Oder als könnten
wir in ein neues, ahnungsvolles Verhältnis zum ganzen Dasein treten,wenn wir anfingen,
mit dem Herzen zu denken.Or as if we could
enter into a new relationship to the whole of being, full of inklings,if we began to think
with the heart.Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Lord
Chandos' Letter

Part I Making way to music

I.1. A parallel way

We are seeking a parallel way to music. The way is to be parallel to the
way to language. From mathematics we know that parallel lines never meet,
or that they intersect only at infinity, but this mathematical understanding
of parallelism should not be allowed to throw us off the track. Instead,
it should first be recalled where the word 'parallel' comes from. It is
Greek in origin, and comes from para\ a)llh/lw,
meaning "next to one another", or "near one another". Thus, the way to
music is supposed to lie next to and to run alongside the way to language,
in itself a mysterious circumstance calling for elucidation.

Why should such a path be sought and embarked upon? Would it not be
more appropriate to ask the question: What is the essence of music? or
What are the essential foundations of music? This type of questioning is
familiar to us through the long tradition of metaphysics. To seek a way
to music is here supposed to indicate that a type of thinking that is no
longer metaphysical is attempting to make its way, to make headway, or
simply, to make way (Be-wëgen). In seeking to make its way,
thinking is to travel on a path that runs alongside the way to language
in order to experience something essential and intrinsic about music, in
particular, its parallelism to language. Travelling on a path and having
regard for the parallel way to language is supposed to provide orientation
for the journey which should allow us to experience music in a way that
is profoundly different from how music has been thought about within the
metaphysical tradition.

'The Way to Language' is the title of a late lecture that Heidegger
held in a series of lectures sponsored by the Bavarian Academy of Fine
Arts and the Academy of the Arts in Berlin in January 1959 under the title
"Language". The lecture is the final text in a series of texts and lectures
which Heidegger wrote in the 1950s and published under the title On
the Way to Language(1).
As the chronologically last text and the text which gives the volume its
title, 'The Way to Language' could well be regarded as the final, mature
fruit of a decade of intensive thinking and writing about language.

How are we to seek a way to music in parallel to a way to language?
We can only do so by looking over toward the way to language to see how
that way makes way. The formula announced at the beginning of 'The Way
to Language' which is to serve as a thread for the way to language is:
"Bring language as language to language." This literal translation of "Die
Sprache als die Sprache zur Sprache bringen" (242) is as such inadequate,
since in German, "zur Sprache bringen" means simply "to thematize, to address
(an issue), to express in words, to put into words". The formula would
thus have to be rendered in English something like: "Put language as
language into words." Heidegger points out that what seems at first to
be a formula will be transformed while under way. In its final reformulation,
the formula will become: "Die Be-wëgung bringt die Sprache (das Sprachwesen)
als die Sprache (die Sage) zur Sprache (zum verlautenden Wort)." (261),
which can be rendered as "Making-way puts language (the essencing of language)
as language (the saying) into language (into spoken words)". Without having
followed the path that leads to this ultimate reformulation of the apparent
formula, this final rendering is initially incomprehensible. Furthermore,
as we shall see, it no longer means a path of thinking which we travel
along.

Here, for the moment, we only have to ask: What does this formula imply
for the parallel way to music? On this path we are trying to make way to
music by way of thinking in language. The essence of music, or music as
music will not be put to music but, at best, it will be put into thoughtful
words. This shows that the way to music in thinking must be a way that
runs alongside any way that leads to music as tuneful and attuning tones.
Thinking can only seek a parallel way to music, and it can only make way
in words that show it the way. The way to music in words is necessarily
a way that runs alongside and next to the way on which music as music makes
way to music. The formula that can serve as a thread for an attempt to
follow a path in thinking to music as music is the following: To put music
as music into music. This formula has to be transformed into the parallel
formula: To put into words the making-way of music as music into music.
Since in thinking we are moving and making way in the medium of language,
the "putting into words" in the formula is redundant. Later on, this formula
will be elaborated and transformed into the as yet incomprehensible formulation:
"Making-way allows music (the essencing of music) as music (the quivering)
to come to music (attuned sounds)".

The way to music that is attempted here (this must be openly admitted(2))
is plagiarism (from L. plagiare: to kidnap) in an essential sense
for the sake of thinking which abducts another's progeny and thoughtfully
compels it to walk along another, parallel way.

The "as" in the formula should be noted. As we shall see, one signification
of this as is that we humans hear music as music, music qua
music. This should not be taken for granted as something self-evident.
We can be sure that many animals hear music, but do they hear music as
music? No, they don't. The metaphysical delineation of human being as the
living being that has the lo/goj provided by
Aristotle e.g. in his Politics is usually understood as the ability
of human beings to speak, which includes of course that we can also listen;
or it is taken to mean, more fundamentally, that we are 'rational creatures'.
It would be too superficial now to claim instead that we human beings are
essentially beings who can hear music as music, but this being-able-to-hear
is presumably related to lo/goj and le/gein
if this is taken in the sense of a gathering. In listening to music, we
are able to gather that it is music and can thus hear it as
music. That something is, i.e. its existentia or Daßsein,
depends on le/gein as a gathering-that... Of
what nature is this gathering that grants the as of music? In the further
course of our way to music it will become apparent that the gathering is
related to an attunement. Such relatedness (pro/j ti)
derives from the parallel ways. Needless to say, such attunement as an
issue for thought lies outside the ambit of metaphysical thinking.

I.2. Music, metaphysically speaking

Music: We mean making music and listening to music as human activities.
Some people are musical and others are not. By this we usually mean that
someone has an ear for music, whereas another is tone deaf. Music is an
acoustic phenomenon; its material is sounds or tones produced by various
instruments or devices, or the human voice. These sounds are ordered in
some way, whether it be in a tonal form, an atonal form or some other form
depending, say, on contingency. A musical work structures a time-space
for us acoustically in some way or other and requires both performers and
listeners. This acoustic time-space is formed tunefully, where "tuneful"
is taken in the broadest possible sense to mean that music attunes us in
some way or other, whether harmoniously or dissonantly or whatever, and
that by our very nature we are attuned to the resounding of musical sounds.

Music, however, is not just musical sounds formed in some way or other,
but is said to have some sort of meaning. Often this is described by saying
that music is the language of the emotions. The view that music signifies
something goes back to the ancients, i.e. to Plato and Aristotle. At the
beginning of the Aristotelean text entitled Peri\
Poihtikh=j we read:

Some make representations using colours and forms, making images of
many things (some by art, and some by customary use), and others do so
with sound; so too all the arts we mentioned make a representation through
rhythm, speech and harmony, but use these either separately or mixedly.
E.g., the art of playing the oboe and lyre, and any other arts that have
such a potential (e.g. that of playing the pan pipes), use harmony and
rhythm alone, but the art of dancers [uses] rhythm by itself without harmony;
for they too can represent stances/characters, moods/emotions/experiences
and actions, by means of rhythms given form. (Trans. Richard Janko, mod.
ME)

The pa/qh mentioned at the end of this quotation
can mean mood, emotion, experience and in general, that which happens to
us and affects us and thus that which we suffer through in the broadest
possible sense. The pa/qh come to pass over
us and arouse our passions in putting us in a mood, i.e. an attuned mode
of being.

The Aristotelean conception of music as a representation parallels his
conception of language as a representation in signs of the 'sufferings'
of the psyche in being affected by what matters to it. What matters to
the psyche is represented in the pa/qh, and
the latter are represented in spoken sounds, and these, in turn, in writing,
which are signs for the spoken sounds (cf. the beginning of Peri\
E(rmhnei/aj). This Aristotelean conception of music, through all
its modifications, is with us to the present day in theories of musical
meaning. Thus e.g. we find in Encyclopaedia Britannica the following
note on Schopenhauer:

Schopenhauer looked upon Platonic Ideas as objectifying will, but music
is "by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy
of the will itself. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful
and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows,
but it speaks of the thing itself."
Schopenhauer acknowledged a connection between human feeling and music,
which "restores to us all the emotions of our inmost nature, but entirely
without reality and far removed from their pain." Music, which he is presenting
as an analogue of the emotional life, is a copy or symbol of the will.
In Schopenhauer's metaphysics, "will" is the title for the essential being
of beings which is represented ("vorgestellt", placed before us) in music.
The commentator in Encyclopaedia Britannica already misrepresents
Schopenhauer by speaking of a "copy or symbol of the will". Why? "Because
music does not, like all the other arts, represent the ideas, or
stages of the objectivation of the will, but represents the will itself."
(Weil die Musik nicht, gleich allen anderen Künsten, die Ideen,
oder Stufen der Objektivation des Willens, sondern den Willen selbst
darstellt. Schopenhauer 1977 Kap. 39, S. 527)

Whether theories of musical meaning are "referentialist" (referring
to meanings outside the music itself) or "formalist" (being autonomous
and thus only 'meaning' itself), the problem of emotion in music remains
to be dealt with, as Encyclopaedia Britannica notes: "The Austrian
critic Eduard Hanslick, in his The Beautiful in Music (German edition
published 1854), was a strong proponent of music as an art of intrinsic
principles and ideas; yet even Hanslick, ardent formalist though he was,
struggled with the problem of emotion in music." Thus the idea prevails
that the sounds of music are signs and signify something to do with emotions
and moods. In slightly modifying a passage in Heidegger's 'The Way to Language'
it can be said: "Music is represented from the viewpoint of musicking with
regard to articulated, structured sounds which are the / bearers of meanings.
Musicking is a human activity." (cf. UzS:245f)

According to the well known Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet in his opus
magnum, Les fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine,
which appeared in 1961 toward the end of the conductor's life, the physiologically
perceived vibrations that are received by the body's sense organs are mirrored
or reflected, i.e. represented, in consciousness, "since bodily affectedness
is ... already the 'mirroring reflection' of physiological phenomena".(3)
From this realist-materialist starting-point of musical tones as a mirroring
reflection in consciousness of physical and physiological processes, whereby
the latter come to be represented in consciousness, Ansermet intends to
show "how, in a resonant space, a spatio-temporal world is constructed
from tonal structures and gains in form" (652) whose "emergence" is "in
the cochlear area" (ibid.)

We see that it is highly probable that electrical waves form for a
duration on the basilar membrane which correlate to the perception of a
tone. When tones that sound simultaneously are heard, other waves are formed
here. Consequently, in the reflection of the phenomenon and in the gaze
of perceptive consciousness, the tonal positions make a movement in space
and time, whereas in simultaneity they form harmonious chords as if, in
the cochlear area, a double train of waves had been formed, one of whose
waves runs longitudinally in time, while the other is transversal and momentary.
(Ansermet op. cit. 653)
Such physiological processes, according to Ansermet, are synthesized into
a musical experience:
Let us now imagine the above tonal schema [an example of three bars
of music ME] as a spatial structure. In the cochlear emergence of this
structure, the momentary wave which arises when the simultaneously vibrating
tones are heard and which links the various cochlear positions with each
other in a single act of perception, has made a synthesis of tonal positions
out of the harmony of tones, just as a molecule is a synthesis of atoms.
(ibid. 654)
What underlies all these considerations of the formation of tonal structures
on a materialist basis is Ansermet's (anthropological) conviction that
"the feeling for music arose at the same moment when humans discovered
music in tones. Humans, however, only discovered their musicality and music
because they possessed an activity of the soul within themselves for which
they felt the need to express in itself." (ibid. 646)

This anthropological explanation takes time as a pregiven dimension
for a narrative about how "humans discovered music" by expressing a movement
of the soul inside in tones outside, thus exemplifying the basic metaphysical
position of the fundamental Aristotelean prescription of the essence of
music as representation already cited above from the Poetics.

I.3. Making way

To the present day, what is essential to music has been regarded as inhering
in musicking as sounds or tones brought into a form. To recur to the formula
of the first section, it can be asked: Does this conception of music appropriately
describe the putting of music as music into music? The traditional metaphysical
way to music sets out in the direction of humankind; it leads through music
to something else: to the representation of human emotions in tonal signs,
in a language of emotions. The essence of music conceived of with regard
to something else, however, does not already point toward or point out
the essencing of music, the mode in which music holds sway and whiles as
music, i.e. rests, gathered into what allows music to come into its own
as music.

If we carefully follow the trace or tracks of music as music, then we
have already renounced the procedures for regarding music that have hitherto
prevailed. We can no longer treat music as the representation of human
experiences, nor as a mirroring of physiological sense data in tonal consciousness,
nor as a formal structure of harmonious sounds, no matter how conventionally
or unconventionally 'harmony' is understood, nor as a representation of
anything at all. Instead of explaining music as this or that, and thus
fleeing from music, the way to music wants to go through an experience
(eine Er-fahrung) of music as music. In defining the essence of
music as a representation or expression, music is indeed comprehended,
but it is grasped by something other than itself. If, on the contrary,
we pay attention to music as music, then it demands of us that everything
that belongs to music as music be brought out into the open.

It is one thing to collect and order various elements that reveal themselves
within the essence of music, and another to gather one's gaze into that
which of itself unifies what belongs together insofar as this unifying
dimension grants the essencing of music its own unity.

The way to music now attempts to follow more strictly the thread which
the formula names: To put into words the making-way of music as music to
music. The aim is to come closer to what is intrinsically characteristic
of music. Here too, music shows itself at first as our musicking. We pay
attention now only to what is always already resonating alongside when
musicking, and that in the same measure, whether it is noticed or not.

People making and listening to music (i.e. musicking in the broad sense)
belong to music as an activity, but not in the sense of cause and effect.
Rather, those musicking have their presence, and
thus present themselves, in musicking. And where are they present? They
are present with what they use for musicking; they are present where they
while with what already affects them in individual and multifarious ways.
What affects them, each in its own way, are other people and things and
everything that attunes these people and affects these things as a whole.
In musicking for each other, whether it be directly in bodily presence,
i.e. live, or indirectly through the media, a whole range of moods is
made to resound in one way or the other; it is modulated and perhaps developed,
attuned in such a way that those musicking by making and listening to music
attune each other and themselves. The songs sung with voice and/or instruments,
alone or together, are manifold. What is musicked may disappear without
leaving a trace or it may be preserved or linger on in some way or other.
What is made to resonate in music may be long past, or it may have been
long since allotted as a music destined to be brought to resonance.

What is sung in the broadest sense of musicking, whether vocal or not,
originates in manifold ways from what is unsung, what is unmusicked, whether
this be what has not yet been musicked or what must be left unmusicked
in the sense of what is withheld from music. Thus what is musicked, i.e.
brought to resonance in music in manifold ways, has the appearance of being
removed from music-making and music-makers and does not belong to them,
whereas in truth it holds up to music-making and music-makers that toward
which they comport themselves, no matter how they dwell in what is musicked
from the unmusicked origin.

A multitude of elements and relations becomes apparent in the essence
of music. They have been counted, but not put into a sequence. In going
through them in an originary accounting which is prior to any calculating
with numbers, their belonging-together has been announced. Counting is
a recounting which looks ahead to what unifies this belonging-together
without, however, being able to bring it out into the open.

The impotence of thinking's gaze that becomes apparent here, to experience
the unifying unity of the essencing of music, is an age-old heritage. This
unity, therefore, has remained unnamed. The traditional names for what
is meant by the name "music" always name it in one respect or another which
is doled out by the essencing of music.

Let the sought-for unity of the essencing of music be called the fugue.
This name calls on us to look more carefully at what properly characterizes
the essencing of music. A fugue is a musical composition in which several
themes, which in their difference flee (L. fugere) from each other,
are nonetheless held together by means of the laws of contrapuntal harmony.
Here, by contrast, the fugue is taken to be the entire manifold of originary
tunes or moods of a time held together and adjoined in the articulated unity of that fugue
which resonates through and originarily opens up the free dimension of
attunement that comes to resonate in manifold attunements. The fugue is
here the originary articulated reverberation of the essencing of music,
the total structured quavering of attunements in which those musicking and
what is musicked and its unmusicked origin are joined in what has been
allotted and conceded by the fugue.

"Essence" is a word laden with meaning from the tradition of metaphysics,
and is derived from the Latin stem "esse", "to be". The essence of something
is what it is in its deepest, most intrinsic, unchanging sense, it is its
'whatness' or, in Latin, 'quidditas'. In German, "essence" is rendered
as "Wesen", which is itself one of the forms of the verb "Sein". "Wesen"
comes from the stem 'wes-', which is also preserved in English in the past
tense of the verb "to be": "was" and "were". In Old English, the infinitive
and present participles of the verb "to be" were still able to be formed
using the 'wes-' stem; the present infinitive was "wesan", the present
participle "wesende" (cf. the OED). The essence of music means what music
is most intrinsically, in its innermost being; the wesan of music is its
most characteristic, ownmost being. Forthwith we will rename the essence
of music its wesan and, to put its ongoing, temporal character into
words, we will call and name it by using the archaic present participle,
the wesende of music instead of a less unusual 'essencing of music'.

The fugue as the unified, ongoing wesende of music remains hidden and
muffled even in its approximate reverberation as long as we do not take
care to note in what sense already musicking and what is musicked have
been spoken of.

Musicking is a making of sounds. It can also be conceived of as a human
activity. Both are correct conceptions of music as musicking. Both are
now put to one side, without us wanting to forget for how long the sounding
of music has already been waiting for an appropriately attuned definition; for, the
acoustico-physiological, emotionally expressive and harmonic explanations of sound-making
and musicking do not experience their provenance in the pealing of stillness.
Still less do they experience the attuned definition of sound-making which
stems from and resonates with this origin.

In what way, however, have musicking
and music been thought in the brief recounting of the wesende (essencing)
of music given above? They already show themselves to be phenomena through
which and in which something makes way to music, i.e. comes to resonance,
insofar
as music is made. Making mere sounds and making music (musicking) are
not the same thing. Somebody may produce a lot of sound, even on the stage
of a concert hall to a large audience, but it is only noise. By contrast,
someone else may scarcely make an audible sound, or make no sound at all,
and with this silence make music.

But what does it mean to music? To experience what this phrase
says we are bound to what our language itself calls on us to think in this
word. "To music" is a nonce-verb to the noun "music", from Greek mou=sa,
the mountain nymph who inspires the singer to sing. The singer can only
sing when attuned with the musical source, and thus inspired through breathing
in the spirit, his or her singing temporarily and temporally permeates
and colours existence as a whole with a particular mood or moods. Mood
is the way the world is open to us momentarily as a whole in any particular
situation at any particular time. It is the way we find ourselves in any
particular situation, whether downcast or uplifted or on even keel. Musicking
must therefore be understood as an opening of world in a particular way
in bringing a mood to resonance.

We are saying something self-evident and yet something that has scarcely
been pondered on in its significance and ramifications when we point out
the following. To sing to each other in musicking means to bring each other
to resonance, to reciprocally let oneself go with the mood of the music.
To music with each other (albeit only by humming a tune or by saying something
or moving one's body or just one's face in a certain way) means: to make
something resonate together, to bring to resonance the tune that inheres
in the music played and thus to allow a certain attunement to vibrate.
What is unheard is not only that which lacks acoustic sound in not having
been made audible, but is also the unmusicked, i.e. what has not yet gained
resonance in an attunement. That which has to remain unheard is withheld
in the unmusicked; it whiles as a hidden secret in muteness as that which
cannot be made to resonate in an attunement, perhaps even for an entire
age. What is granted to resonance resounds as an attunement in the sense
of what has been allotted, whose resounding does not even need any sound.

Musicking, as the resounding of an attunement, belongs to the fugue
of the wesende of music which is permeated by the modes and melodies of
resonance in which moods are announced, conceded and denied, come to resonance
and amplitude in attunement or withdraw, ebb and fade. What runs through
the entire fugue of the wesende of music is the manifold resounding of
attunements from various provenances. With regard to the relations or rapport
of attuned resounding, we call the entirety of the wesende (essencing)
of music the
quivering
and admit that, even now, what unifies these
relations of attuned resounding in the fugue of music has not yet come
into sight.

The word "quivering", like many other words in our language, is today
usually used in a pejorative sense. "Quivering" is regarded as a description
for that which is not firm, which shakes and trembles (perhaps with fear)
and thus is not steadfast, robust and sturdy, perhaps wavering, ill-defined,
ambiguous. The earth may shake and quiver in an earthquake that brings
destruction. A person or an animal may quiver with fright or agitation
(the OED quotes: "His hand trembled and his flesh quivered." 1869), but
perhaps also with sheer, overbrimming vitality. The quivering or rapid
agitation of the prongs of a tuning fork allows a pure tone to resound.
People quiver with emotions resonant with a situation. Quivering may possess
the unreleased tension of a potential for movement. Every situation is
resonant with the quivering of a mood which attunes those who are currently,
i.e. temporally, in that situation. Quivering is the hearth in whose radiance
the attunement of moods can come to resonance. We can understand quivering
from the attunements which resonate with it.

The wesende of music is quivering as the attuning of a mood.
A mood is the mode or colour of any given situation. We humans are open
to this originary quivering as an opening of world in a given time, and can therefore
resonate with it in an attunement or a mood. Quivering's attuning is not
based on any feelings or sensibilities, but rather, all feelings and sensibilities
stem from an attuning quivering within whose resonance feelings as such
can be felt.

With a view to the fugue-like character of quivering, we must not ascribe
attuning exclusively or primarily to human activity. Attunement as resonance
characterizes the presence and absence, the resounding and fading of moods
of all kinds and degree in an age. Even when attunement is brought about by our musicking,
this attuning as the striking of a chord is preceded by a propensity and
proclivity to resonate in a mood.

Only when we think about our attunement in this regard can an adequate
characterization of the wesende in all musicking be achieved. We know about
musicking as a structured production of sounds by means of musical instruments
and voices. But making music is also listening. Usually, making music and
listening to music are counterposed to each other. Some make music and
others listen. But listening accompanies and encloses musicking not only
in the sense that music requires listeners. The simultaneity of making
music and listening means more than this. Making music is in itself a listening.
It is a listening to the music which we music. Thus musicking is not a
listening at the same time, but is rather a listening beforehand.
This listening to music precedes all other kinds of listening in the most
imperceptible way. We do not just make music, but we music out of music.
We can only do this by virtue of having already listened to music. What
do we hear? We hear the musicking of music.

But does music itself music? How could music do this, since it does
not have any musical instruments nor a voice with vocal cords, mouth, tongue,
etc. Nevertheless, music musics. In the first place and properly
speaking, music follows the wesende (essencing) of music: the quivering.
Music musics by quivering, i.e. by attuning a mood. Its quivering emanates
from the once musicked and still unmusicked quivering which vibrates throughout
the fugue of music's wesende. Music musics as attunement by reaching
into all ranges of attunement from which moods are brought to resonance
or fade. Accordingly, we listen to music in the mode of allowing it to
attune us with its quivering. No matter in what other modes we also listen,
whenever we listen to something, listening means allowing oneself to
resonate with the quivering thus enabling all apprehension of mood
and feeling. In musicking as this fundamental listening to music, we are
attuned to the quivering that we have already heard and make it resonate.
We let music's silent voice come and we reach toward the sound that has
been reserved for us and call for it. Within the fugue of the wesende of
music, at least one trait has now announced itself more clearly in which
we see how music as musicking is brought back into its own and thus musics
as music.

When musicking, as listening to music, lets itself be attuned by the
quivering, this letting-be can only be granted insofar and insonear as
our own wesan (being) is immersed in quivering. We only hear it because
we belong to it. Quivering only grants listening-to-music, and thus musicking,
to those who belong to it. Such granting whiles in quivering. It lets us
reach the ability to music. The wesende of music rests in quivering that
grants the reach to musicking.

And quivering itself? Is it something completely separated from our
musicking to which a bridge has to be built? Or is quivering the stream
of stillness which itself bridges its banks, of attunement and our musicking,
by forming them? Our usual ideas about music can scarcely reach this point.
Quivering — when we try to think the wesende of music starting from it,
do we not run the risk of inflating music into a fantastic, autonomous
being which cannot be found anywhere as long as we think soberly and circumspectly
about music? Music remains, after all, inextricably bound to human singing
and musicking. To be sure. But what kind of bond is this? Whence and how
does its binding hold sway and bind? Music needs human musicking and is
nevertheless not merely something made by our activity in musicking. Wherein
lies the essence of music? On what is it grounded? Perhaps we are asking
in a direction that misses the wesende essence of music when we ask for
grounds.

Is quivering itself the resting which grants rest to what belongs together
in the fugue of the wesende of music?

Before we think about this further, let us once more pay attention to
the way to music. Initially it was said: the more clearly music comes into
sight as itself, the more decisively will the way to it change. Up until
now, the way had the character of a path which leads our thinking in the
direction of music within the strange interweaving of relations named by
the formula for the way to music. We started from ideas about the essence
of music as a formal structure of sounds or as a language of emotions or
as a transformative mirroring of acoustic vibrations in consciousness to
form tonal structures. After that, there came a recounting of what belongs
to the structural fugue of music. By following this path in thought we
reached music as quivering.

I.4. The quivering of propriation

With the explanatory recounting of the wesende of music as quivering, the
way to music from music as music has reached its destination. Thinking
has arrived after travelling along the way to music. It seems to be so
and it is so as long as the way to music is taken to be a path of thinking
which thoughtfully follows the track that leads to music. In truth, however,
thinking now sees that it has only just been brought to the way to music
and has scarcely been set upon its track. For, in the meantime, something
has become apparent in the wesende of music which shows that in music as
quivering, something resembling a way holds sway.

What is a way? A way allows somewhere to be reached. It is quivering
which, insofar as we listen to it, allows us to reach the musicking of
music.

The way to musicking whiles in music itself. The way to music in the
sense of musicking is music as quivering. What is characteristic and proper
to music thus hides itself in the way in which quivering lets those who
listen to it come to music. We can only be these listeners insofar as we
belong to quivering. The way that lets us reach music comes already from
being enabled to belong to quivering. This belonging shelters what is properly
wesende in the way to music. But how does quivering hold sway that it is
able to enable and grant such belonging? If at all, then the wesende of
quivering in its own right must announce itself as soon as we pay attention
insistently enough to what recounting has yielded.

Quivering is attuning. In everything which affects us, which touches
us as a mood that has been brought to resonance, which attunes us, which
waits for us as the unmusicked, but also in the musicking which we ourselves
perform, attuning holds sway which lets moods reverberate and fade. Quivering
is in no way a supplementary expression of mood; rather, all moods and
their fading reside in and rest on attuning quivering. Quivering liberates
moods into their proper reverberation and retracts other, fading moods
into their dying resonance. Quivering permeates and composes the free fugue
in the resonant temporal clearing which all moods have to seek out and
from which all spent moods fade, in which all resonance and fading away
have to reverberate.

Quivering is the composing gathering of the intrinsically many-fold
modes of attunement which conducts the fugue of all attunement and in each
case enables each mood to remain with itself.

Whence does attuning come? This question asks for too much and too impetuously.
It suffices to pay attention to what stirs in attuning and brings its stirring
to differentiated fruition. Here we do not need to search tediously. The
simple, sudden, unforgettable and therefore perpetually fresh gaze into
what is familiar to us suffices. Although it is familiar, we do not even
try to get to know it, let alone to gain knowledge of it in an appropriate
way. This unknown, familiar element which stirs all attuning of quivering
into reverberation is, for each and every mood, whether reverberating or
fading, the early morn of that morning on which the change of day and night
first raises itself as a possibility: what is earliest and primordially
ancient at one and the same time. We can only name it, because it does
not tolerate being discussed at length, for it is the locality (birthplace)
of all places and spaces for the play of time. We use an old word to name
it and say:

What stirs in quivering's attuning is propriety.(4)
Propriety brings each reverberating and fading mood into its own from which
its characteristic attunement resonates and whiles according to its nature.
Let the propriety which brings by stirring quivering as attunement into
its attuning be called propriation (Ereignis). Propriation
grants the free openness of the reverberant, temporal clearing into which
an attunement can reverberate and from which a fading mood can fade and
in its withdrawal preserve its whiling. What propriation grants through
quivering is never the effect of a cause, never the consequence of a determining
reason. Propriety which brings anything into its own, i.e. propriation,
is more granting than any effectiveness, making, producing or grounding.
What is propriating is propriation itself, and nothing else besides. Propriation,
viewed here in quivering's attuning, cannot be conceived as an event nor
as a happening nor as an act; in the neighbourhood of music it can only
be experienced in quivering's attuning as that which grants moods. There
is nothing else to which propriation leads further back or from which,
in terms of which, it could be explained. Propriation is not a result given
by something else, but is itself the granting whose reaching giving first
grants something resembling a "let there be..." which even beyng itself
needs in order to come into its own as presencing. Whereas beyng as presencing
allows each being its presence in and absence from the clearing, quivering
is the resonant accompaniment to beyng that grants the temporal coming
and going of moods which holistically colour the clearing.

Propriation gathers the fugue of quivering and unfolds it to the fugue
of many-fold attunement. Propriation is what is most inconspicuous among
the inconspicuous, the simplest among the simple; it is what is nearest
among the near, what is farthest among the far, and that within which we
mortals dwell during our life-time.

We can only name the propriation that holds sway in quivering by saying:
Propriation propriates. If we say this, we speak in our own, already spoken
language.

Propriation grants mortals their dwelling in their wesan so that they
can be the ones who speak and music. (Even the mode of speaking, the way
or how of speaking is in this sense music.) If law is understood as the
gathering of that which enables everything to presence appropriately, i.e.
to come into its own in the proper way, then propriation is the plainest
and gentlest of all laws. Propriation is of course not a law in the sense
of a norm which somehow hovers over us; it is not an ordinance which orders
and regulates a process.

Propriation is the law of all laws insofar as it gathers mortals into
propriation to their wesan and holds them there.

Because the attuning of quivering is part of propriety, being able to
listen, to sense and feel also rests on quivering, on belonging to quivering
in propriation. In order to see this in the entirety of its ramifications,
it would be necessary to think through the wesan of mortals sufficiently
in its interrelations, and of course propriation as such. Here, a hint
will have to suffice.

In having its eye on human being, propriation appropriates mortals by
giving them over to that which grants itself to humankind in quivering
from everywhere toward what is encrypted. The enpropriation of humankind
as the ones who are attuned to quivering is characterized by its
releasing human being into its own, but only so that humans, as the ones
who music, respond to quivering in their very own way. This is the making
of music. The responding music of mortals is already an answer:
a listening, attuned, accommodating musicking. The enpropriation of mortals
to quivering releases human being into usage whence it is used to put soundless
quivering into resounding music.

Through enpropriating usage, propriation allows quivering to reach resonance
in music. The way to music belongs to the quivering that resonates out
of propriation as an accompaniment, parallel to the way to language that belongs to the saying
defined out of propriation. What is characteristic
of music encrypts itself on this way which belongs to the wesende of music.
The way is propriating: propriation appropriates human being for its use
through enpropriating it to quivering.

To make a way, e.g. through a field covered with snow, is called "wëgen"
even today in Alemannic-Swabian dialect. This verb, which is used transitively,
means: to form a path, to keep it ready for use through forming it. Thought
in this way, be-wëgen (Be-wëgung, not Bewegung,
movement) no longer means to move something along a way which already exists,
but to make the way. Making-way (Be-wëgung) is the originary
movement that first makes the way and thus is the way.

Propriation appropriates humankind into usage for itself. In propriating
attunement as its own property, propriation is the making-way of quivering
to music, just as, in parallel, in propriating pointing as its own property,
propriation is the making-way of saying to language. The formula for the
way to music thus becomes:

Making-way brings music (the fugue as the wesende of music) as music
(quivering) to music (resounding song). In talking of a way to music,
it now no longer means merely and primarily the path of our thinking which
thinks about music. The way to music has changed on the way. It has been
displaced from our activity into the propriated wesende of music. But the
change in the way to music only seems to us, from our own standpoint, to
be a displacement that only now takes place. In truth, the way to music
has always had its sole locality (birthplace) within the wesende of music
itself. This, however, also means that the way to music in the first sense
does not become superfluous, but only becomes possible and necessary through
the way proper, the making-way that propriates and uses. For, because the
wesende of music rests in propriation as attuning quivering, which hands
us humans over to the serenity of free, attuned listening, only the making-way
of quivering to music opens up to us the paths on which we think about
the proper way to music.

The formula of the way: bring music as music to music, contains
not only an instruction for us as the ones who are thinking about music;
it also says the form of the fugue as the formal structure within which
the wesende of music, resting in propriation, makes way. This formal structure
announced by the formula seems to express a network of relations in which
music is entangled. It seems as if any attempt to imagine and represent
music requires dialectical contrivances to master this entanglement. Such
a procedure instigated by the formula neglects, however, the possibility
of letting oneself reflectingly into the movement of making-way to view
the simplicity of the wesende of music, instead of wanting to represent
it imaginingly to the mind's eye.

What seems like a tangled network disentangles itself, when viewed from
making-way, into the liberation brought about by the making-way eventuating
propriatingly in quivering. Making-way releases quivering into musicking.
It clears the way on which musicking as sensitive listening captures what
is to be musicked from quivering and elevates what it captures to music.
The making-way of quivering to music is the releasing bond that binds by
ap-propriating to itself.

Released into its own free element in this way, music can concern itself
solely with itself. This sounds like talk of an egoistic solipsism. But
music does not insist on itself in the sense of a merely egocentric self-mirroring
which forgets everything else. As music, the wesende of music is propriating
attuning which deflects from itself precisely in order to liberate
what is attuned into the propriety of its own mood.

Music which musics in quivering is concerned that our musicking, in
listening to what is unmusicked, responds to music's quivering. Thus, silence
too, which is often slipped under music as its origin is already a responding.
Silence responds to the soundless pealing of the stillness of propriating-attuning
quivering. Quivering that rests within propriation is, in attuning, an
ownmost mode of propriating (as melody) that is parallel to the way language
comes to speech. Propriation is attuning. Music thus musics according to
the mode and melody in which propriation reverberates or withdraws.

I.4.1 Propriation and the gainful game

A thinking pondering on propriation can still only surmise this,
but nevertheless already go through the experience of it in the essence
of modern economy that has been named with the still strange name of the
gainful
game or the gathering of the gainable(5).
Insofar as the gainful game entices humankind to reach out to gain all
that seems or is valuable, the gainful game prevails in the mode of propriation
in such a way that it obscures propriation at the same time, because all
gainfully reaching-out-for is borne by a grasping mood responding to the
quivering of the gainful game. Propriation is thus inverted in the gainful
game as if it were the human players who were to be the gainers of all
beings have to offer. Human musicking is enticed to respond upbeat to the
gainability of all that is in every direction.

Musicking enticed in this way becomes commercial, venal music catering
to popular taste which at the same time it shapes. Commercial music itself
is out for gain by being sold. It is only bought in being valued as in
tune with the mood of modern lives en masse. In the age of 'here comes
everybody' (Joyce), to be gainful,
commercial music needs the mass market on which it is valued as being in
tune with the mood of the times, and conversely, commercial music attunes
masses of people by bringing certain timely moods to resound pleasurably.
Commercial music has to continually surmise which tune will attune and
resonate with the music market's likes or a segment or niche thereof; it
deals in moods by catering to them and/or awakening them. Musicians can
only live and support themselves
as musicians in the gainful game
by having their music valued on the large or small market representing
the audience to which they appeal in the double sense of the word. Their
musicking is always at the pivotal point between, on the one hand, catering,
or even pandering, to the mood of the times, especially on mass markets,
and, on the other, awakening a mood by being receptive to the quivering
of propriation making way to music, through which humankind can be captivated
by an attunement emanating from the quivering.

Music is appreciated and valued, including monetarily, by catering to
and moulding people's tastes that, in turn, resonate unknowingly with the
mood of an age. Music does this at first and for the most part by repeating
the well-worn, habituated melodies that people have come to accept and
love as music evoking a familiar mood or time, but also by creatively catching
the mood of a time and putting it to work in a musical work, which may
be simply a pop song. People, the subject created by the mass market, only
gradually learn to distinguish music from noise, and appreciate a music
as
music, through a process of habituation enabling them to appropriate the
sound as musical (which is a hermeneutic phenomenon) and appreciate
the music as resonating with the life of the times. The musical experience
thus familiarized becomes the repetitition of something familiar, assuring
listeners of their world, its mood, and keeping this world open. For this
reassurance of world, and also for the uplifting of their mood, listeners
will pay, and from this willingness, venal music, whether high or low brow,
derives its market value. There is, however, another music that explores
the outer reaches of the hitherto unheard in the attempt to tune into it
and allow it to come to resounding resonance in a musical work. Such musical
composing ignores the gainful game, taking place on its margins, and devotes
itself to resonant possibilities beyond what is already appealing.

Propriation is attuning. This sounds like a statement. If we only hear
a statement, then it is not what has to be thought. Quivering is the mode
in which propriation musics; it is mode thus not so much as a type or kind
but mode as mood and me/loj, the melody that
attunes, since propriation's quivering brings moods to reverberate in their
own right; it allows them to resonate in their own wesan (beyng) as the
temporal colouring of the clearing.

Language has been called "the house of being". Language's sister, music,
is the ineffable reverberation of quivering in and around that house. It
is the care for quivering insofar as its reverberating remains entrusted
to the appropriate, propriating attunement to quivering. Music is the care
for quivering because, as the response to quivering, it is propriation's
mode as melody that may bring an age to resonance.

In order to think about the essencing (wesende) of music and to say
what properly belongs to music, a change in music is necessary which we
can effect neither by force nor through invention. The change cannot result
from acquiring a new kind of music. The change touches on our relationship
to music, our rapport with music. This relationship is determined by the
destiny of whether and how we are kept in rapport by the wesende of music
as the originary quivering of propriation, since propriation, in propriating,
holding and holding-itself-back is the quintessence of all binding holds.
For this reason, our musicking as a response always remains held
in the binding hold of a rapport. Rapport is thought here throughout against
the foil of propriation and no longer merely in the form of a relation
between terms. Our rapport with music, our binding bond with music is determined
by the attuned mood and mode in which we belong to propriation's quivering
as those who, in belonging and therefore listening sensitively, are used
by propriation for its resonating.

I.5. A remainder that cannot be gathered

The way to music has come to an end, or rather come into its end in culminating
in the formula: Making-way brings music (the fugal structure as the
wesende of music) as music (the quivering of propriation) to music (resounding
song). In this formula, the final occurrence of music is musicking
as the human activity of making certain 'musical' sounds. But is making
sound the only way in which humans respond to and resonate with quivering?
Let us listen to what language says about music. The OED includes under
the entry for 'music' a colloquial expression: "to make music" or "to make
(beautiful) music (together)" as meaning "to have sexual intercourse",
to make love. This linguistic usage can be taken as a hint that the understanding
of music should not be restricted exclusively to an art-form involving
playing on instruments and singing with voices, but should be extended
to cover the moodful mode of bodying. "Bodying" here is the present participle
of a verb, "to body" meaning, "to exist bodily". Dasein (human being) as
finite existence in the world is always a bodily existing; its existing
is always a bodying which itself is a physical being-moved and moving oneself.
Speaking, singing, sitting, walking, sleeping are ways of bodying, of moving
oneself physically, and each way is a mode which is attuned — in some way
or other, even to the point of being completely out of tune — to quivering,
i.e. to the vibration of a situation as a whole in Dasein's timespace,
through which it moves in existing. Insofar as bodying is attuned to quivering,
i.e. has a sense for and is sensitive to the mood emanating from quivering,
it is beautiful. Such beauty is the way music (the quivering) makes way
to music. Since attunement is the mooded how of being-in-the-world in being
moved by quivering, all existence is tuneful in the broad sense of a temporary
and temporal vibe of moving being-in-the-world. Such attunement of existence
is only possible because Dasein irrevocably belongs to propriation; indeed,
propriation eventuates
as Dasein in Dasein's attuned-moved belonging
to it. Dasein's tunefulness, human being's essential musicality, is nothing
other than its moved attunement with the quivering of propriation that
enables also its receptiveness for the musicking of musicians.

If music as human musicking is a way of bodying, of physical moving,
that ineluctably is attuned to some mood or other granted by quivering,
then even the art-form music cannot be confined to singing and playing
instruments, but must include at least dance as well. The way the body
moves in dance, an artful way of Dasein's bodying, is music too. The closeness
of music and dance is apparent not only phenomenally, but also is indicated
by language; the word we employ for an ensemble of musicians, "orchestra",
comes from the Greek "o)rxh/stra" which means
originally that part of the theatre between the stage and the audience
where the choir sang and danced, from o)rxh/sasqai
'to dance' which, as Aristotle says, is a special way to move oneself (Met.
1034a15), a way denied to beings not in the way of human being: "Namely,
many beings can move through themselves, but not in a special way such
as dancing" (polla\ ga\r dunata\ me\n u(f' au(tw=n
kinei=sqai a)ll' ou)x w(di/, oi(=on o)rxh/sasqai. ibid.). Music
and dancing as art-forms of human being colour the open timespace of existence
with a certain mood and are themselves movements responding to quivering's
moods. Quivering motivates human being with e-motions that come out as
the movement of music. Listeners to music, in turn, move inwardly and outwardly
to its vibes. The human psyche quivers in tune with the music; the human
body dances. We enjoy music by virtue of its en-joying, up-lifting us with
the vibrant vibrations of life's movements.

The truth of music lies not in its bringing a truth into the open where
it stands in outline and can be understood and said, but in its being attuned
with a mood granted by quivering which it brings to resonance in a special
mode of bodying, which may even be simply the vibrant resting of attentive
listening. Both those making music and those listening belong originarily
to the quivering, and only by virtue of this propriation can they music
and listen and thus
be musical. All musicking is originarily a moved
listening to the quivering. All human being is an attuned moving to the
quivering, through to the negative mode of an unmusical insensitivity that
cannot be moved and is thus entirely unmelodious, stiff, rigid.

Speaking too is a mode of bodying. If language as pointing comes to
spoken speech in which beings are presenced and absenced, the way of language,
its lilt, its mode is also attuned to quivering in some way or other. In
its bodily moving modality, the way of speaking is willy-nilly attuned
with a mood. A way of speaking always accompanies what is spoken, which
makes all speaking musical in the broadest sense of a mode of bodying attuned
to quivering in one way or the other. In particular, the art-form, poetry,
its reciting, is lyrical. There is always music in poetry, and poetry is
song. Reading and writing too are not without their music. What is
said in writing is always accompanied by the music of how it is
said. The unsaid underpins and embraces what is said; there is always an
excess vibration beyond the said, since all speaking is a response to the
"pealing of stillness" which cannot be entirely defined and confined in
articulated language. This pealing peals in the silence between the words.
Thus Beckett can write in his first, albeit posthumously published novel:

The blown roses of a phrase shall catapult the reader into the tulips
of the phrase that follows. The experience of my reader shall be between
the phrases, in the silence, communicated by the intervals, not the terms,
of the statement, between the flowers that cannot coexist, the antithetical
(nothing so simple as antithetical) seasons of words, his experience shall
be the menace, the miracle, the memory, of an unspeakable trajectory. (6)
Beckett wants his readers to experience, in a movement of reading, the
silence "between the phrases", the unsaid, as if the words in themselves
were merely the handmaidens of the silence that is to be assisted to come
to resonance. It is as if Beckett knew that, for all the power of language
to bring beings into definition before us, it is helpless in the face of
the quivering openness whence beings arrive and through which language
itself is moved in coming to language. There is a longing for this silence
at work in Beckett:
So shall their voices pass away, begin and end, the syllables sound,
sound and pass away, the second after the first, the third after the second,
and so forth and so on in order, until the last after the rest, and silence,
with a bit of luck, after the last... (ibid. p.105)
Human musicking in the broadest sense of a mode of bodying, mellifluous
or not, is not a point of origin whence something else is brought forth
to stand in the clearing, but rather, the bringing-to-resonance of music
is already its fading, its coming to presence already also its absencing,
for it takes no defined and persisting stand in time, but is a movement
granted by the giving of time itself. Music and dance are performing arts
because they are nothing but the performing, i.e. a mode of physical, moving
bodying that modulates Dasein's timespace in colouring it with a mood.
Timespace's plasticity consists in its openness to being coloured by reverberant
mood, or conversely, mood is the mode of time's movement, i.e. the way
time reverberates through its own space and is received by those who are
open to, i.e. ineluctably attuned to, the quivering. Tones and gestures
have no extension in space, like the paint on a canvas does; rather, their
extension is purely temporal,(7) i.e.
movement itself. Just as the paint in a painting colours the subjectile,
the sound of music, or even the visual reverberation of a gesture as a
mode of movement, colours temporal space temporarily ("I'm sorry for smudging
the air with my song," sings Leonard Cohen) by extending as movement in
time and eventually fading.

We are musical beings insofar as the world opens up to us by way of
resonating with a unified but manifold quivering. If, as Heidegger says,
the "pealing of stillness" is the essencing of language which comes to
spoken language, then, as the quivering, it is also the essencing of music
which, as accompaniment, takes a parallel way to language in coming to
the movement of audible music and visible dance. This parallelism means
that there is always an excess resonance of pealing which does not come
to spoken language that is somehow understood, but which comes to reverberate
ungraspably and moodfully in music. The truth of beyng is a vibrant clearing
not only for beings to show themselves as beings but also for the vibrations
of a situation, a 'state of affairs', perhaps even of an age, to reverberate
in a definite, moved attunement, no matter how in-definable and indeterminate
it may be. Because of the twofold in the open clearing underlying the parallelism
of language and music, there is always a remainder that does not come to
language, and thus is not grasped by understanding. This remainder that
cannot be gathered resonates nevertheless, and music is attuned with these
resonances. Our sensitivity to the quivering makes us moved-moving musical
beings physically bodying in timespace.

A determination of human being as musical here is not intended to replace
the traditional metaphysical definition of human being as to\
z%=on lo/gon e)/xon. Rather, it points in the direction of the twofold
dimensions within the openness of being. In 'having the logos', we humans
are able to speak and disclose beings in their being. The moods which affect
and move human being e-motionally are not a mode of disclosure which can
come simply to speech; they cannot be decrypted in the defining work of
language. This inability of mood to come to language, its non-amenability
to being said, should not, however, be regarded as a defect or drawback
compared with the disclosing, decrypting power of language. Rather, the
opening-up achieved by mood takes place in that other dimension within
the twofold of the clearing, and this dimension is the open, resonating
accompaniment to all understanding and saying through which human being
is moved and also moves itself in response. The clearing is two-dimensional
or cloven, enabling the wesende (essencing) of both language and music
to pass through to human being, each in its own way. With equal justification
one could say that understanding itself cannot as such come to music (song,
dance, gestures) but must rely on the accompanying attunement resonating
with quivering to be moved and so to attain presence in this musical dimension
as the passing movement of musicking in time. When saying (the wesende
of language), accompanied by quivering (the wesende of music), comes to
language, it is lyrical poetry and song. Hence it can be said that, despite
the thoughtful way to music being parallel to the way to language, and
thus, in a certain sense, derivative of Heidegger's line of thinking on
the way to language, the parallel way of thinking on music nevertheless
justifies itself by showing the twofold dimensionality of propriation itself.
It is therefore by no means superfluous, but complements Heidegger's mature
thinking on language. The plagiarism is thus redeemed.

The musical dimension of human being as its moved self-moving in time
(including the vibrant rest of attentive listening) was not overlooked
entirely in the beginnings of metaphysics, even as it was providing the
fundamental essential definition of human being with its far-reaching consequences
throughout occidental history. The lo/goj was
given hegemony over the human soul (yuxh/).
This does not prevent Plato, however, from seeing the phenomena and recognizing
that the ability to dance is a god-given gift which is part of the human
essence and a precondition for any form of education (Ou)kou=n
o( me\n a)pai/deutoj a)xo/reutoj h(mi=n e)/stai, to\n de\ pepaideume/non
i(kanw=j kexoreuto/ta qete/on; "Thus, won't anybody who is uneducated
be regarded as someone who cannot dance, whereas someone who has been educated
must be regarded as someone who can dance sufficiently well?" Plato Leg.
II 654a). This god-given gift too, and not just the lo/goj,
the ability to speak, sets us apart from the animals as the quote above
from Aristotle has already indicated. Our sense of order in movements allows
us to partake of many moods, including joy in particular, through song
and dance:

This word says that all young beings, as they say, are unable to keep
still (behave quietly) with their bodies and voices, but always seek to
move and cry out, on the one hand by hopping and jumping as if they were
dancing and playing with pleasure, and on the other, by calling out all
kinds of sounds. The other animals do not have a sense for the order or
disorder in movements, for that which is called rhythm and harmony. To
us, however, the gods who, as we said, have been given to us to dance with,
have also given the sense of pleasure in rhythm and harmony through which
they put us into motion and cause us to dance, by lining us up together
in songs and round dances, and they called these 'choirs' according to
their natural name which is related to chará (= joy).

Not only can we talk and think, but we can also dance and sing, and this
observation would seem to indicate that human being in its finitely temporal,
moving bodiliness implies a broadening of scope regarding what constitutes
human being in an alternative thinking.(8)

Part II Thinking on Western music

II.1 Subjectivist aesthetics (Adorno)

An obvious issue arises from the preceding path of thinking and its unusual,
if not downright strange, determination of the essencing of music as the
making-way of the quivering of propriation to the resonant musicking of
human beings, namely: What does it have to do with aesthetic theories of
music that have held sway for two hundred years and continue to do so today?
Aesthetics today remains the term employed ubiquitously and thoughtlessly
for all discourse on art. The word 'aesthetics' was not even employed in
the preceding part. Rather, there was much said of moods and attunement
as a way in which the world opens up for human being.

In a recent book on music aesthetics (Cross et al. 2004), there
is not a single mention of 'attunement', and the word 'mood' is employed
once in two hundred pages. This can be taken as an indication that the
preceding path of thinking is way off the trajectory of recent aesthetic
discussions of music. The thought that music is a "language of the emotions"
or that the composer "expresses emotions" and communicates them to listeners,
by contrast, is well represented in the book. This is presumably because
aesthetics is used to dealing with subjects who express and communicate
emotions through art works — even, and especially, when repudiating "putrid
emotionality" (Eduard Hanslick, as cited by Wellmer p. 72), an exclamation
which is itself presumably an antithetical reaction to the Romantic yearning
"to think with the heart" (Hofmannsthal). The authors are at ease with,
and employ the vocabulary of the metaphysics of subjectivity/objectivity,
thus remaining at home in the established paradigm of modernity. The notion
that a quivering from 'out there' could make its way to human musicking
is antithetical to any aesthetic theory for which the human subject remains
unquestioned and unquestionable as the underlying instance for art works.

II.1.1 Meaningful musical language?

Albrecht Wellmer opens his article entitled 'On Language and Music' with
the question, "Is music speech-like (sprachähnlich)?" (p. 71) with
the intention of answering it in the affirmative. It turns out, of course,
that this question is not asking for a way to music that parallels the
way to language and that for the simple reason that both language and music
from the outset are conceived unquestionably as human products. What worries
Wellmer is whether music has a relation to the outside world consisting
of "conceptual and emotional threads" (p. 72, citing Nietzsche), or whether
it could free itself "from the yoke of extra-musical purposes and intentions"
and instead concern itself only with its internal rules and questions,
as purportedly is the case with "serial music at the latest" (ibid.). Wellmer
wishes to refute such an 'internally generated', 'formalist' or 'absolute'
conception of music. No matter on which side of Wellmer's worry one finds
oneself, music is regarded as an art work produced by composer-producers.

Wellmer is concerned with the question, "does purely instrumental music
have a world-relation, a connection to the extra-musical domain" (p. 78),
whereby he assumes that "the world-relation of the arts refers back to
language and the dimensions of linguality" (p. 82). Language is therefore
for Wellmer the connection to the world, and therefore there is no problem
regarding whether literature or film have a world-relation. The thesis
that music possesses a linguality thus insists the world does not take
a parallel way to human being, but that music is a human product that must
maintain a connection, and pass through language to make sense, even when
music, like other art forms, remains a "riddle", as Wellmer claims, citing
Adorno: "All works of art [...] are riddles" (p. 110). And, he asserts, it has an
"aura" that, "in meaningful music", "'exceeds' the purely material sound-structure"
(p. 119). How could this excess be produced by an artist subject? Why should
this excess be meaningful and linguistic in nature? If an art work's aura
is not something 'objective', how is it to be located in its excessiveness
within today's hegemonic paradigm of subjectivist metaphysics?

This brings in Adorno as a major point of reference for music aesthetics
during the past half-century. The thesis initially cited by Wellmer, "Music
is like language" (Musik ist sprachähnlich), comes from Adorno (1978),
who opens his 'Fragment on Music and Language' with this gambit which is
in itself an admission of failure. As evidence
for the similarity, Adorno cites that the "traditional musical theory of
forms knows of movement/sentence, semi-movement/semi-sentence, period,
punctuation; question, answer, parenthesis; auxiliary movements/clauses
are to be found everywhere, and in all this, the gesture of music is borrowed
from the voice, which speaks." (traditionelle musikalische Formenlehre
weiß von Satz, Halbsatz, Periode, Interpunktion; Frage, Antwort,
Parenthese; Nebensätze finden sich überall, Stimmen heben und
senken sich, und in all dem ist der Gestus von Musik der Stimme entlehnt,
die redet. ibid. S. 251) An interpretation of language in these terms is
already metaphysical, going all the way back to Plato and Aristotle and
the Alexandrine grammarians, so Adorno is here naively positing a metaphysical
thesis about both music and language that diverges wholly from the way
to language and the parallel way to music by ignoring and overlooking that
speaking with the voice (Stimme) is always also attuned (gestimmt), so
that any logic of saying is always accompanied by an 'illogical' attuning
of mood.

The positing of music's similarity to language ties music to lo/goj
and everything that flows from it in the history of Western thinking by
way of rationality and ratio. Hence, for Adorno, music, too, has unquestionably
an "immanent logic" (immanente Logik, S. 255) that must be respected and
obeyed if it is not to become a "mere game" (bloßes Spiel, ibid.).
Tied to logic in this way, music is destined to participate in the access
to the world through the lo/goj even though
the attempt to spell out the musical meaning, according to Adorno, must
finally fail. The way music itself is conceived thus remains within the
penumbra of logic, despite all rebellion in the same breath against it.
Hence music does not come into its own element in Adorno's thinking.

The epitome of the language-likeness of music is provided by tonal music,
whose "vocabulary" (Vokabeln, ibid.), "chords" (Akkorde, ibid.) and "habituated
connections" (eingeschliffene Verbindungen, ibid.) sediment as "second
nature" (zweite Natur, S. 252) whose "coagulated formulae" (die geronnenen
Formeln, ibid.) threaten to become "mechanical" (mechanisch, ibid.), against
which the "new music" (neue Musik, ibid.) rebelled, without, however losing
its similarity to language. Adorno thus sticks to his thesis also for the
new music: there is a logic of both tonality and the new, atonal music,
without which neither can be music, but rather become arbitrary.
At the same time, Adorno insists, this musical logic must not degenerate
into mere lifeless form.

The excess of musical language, according to Adorno, consists not in
its down-to-earth, but ungraspable moodedness, but in its transcendent
"theological aspect" (theologischer Aspekt, ibid.), for music's "idea"
(Idee, ibid.) is "the Gestalt of the divine name" (die Gestalt des göttlichen
Namens, ibid.) that humans vainly attempt to spell out in music. Human
musical intentions to "say the Absolute" (das Absolute [...] sagen, S. 254) mediatedly
thus fail, Adorno asserts, just as the attempts of "language that means
to say something" (meinende Sprache, ibid.), to say the Absolute, immediately
fail. "Music hits it [the Absolute] directly, but at the same moment it
darkens itself" (Musik trifft es unmittelbar, aber im gleichen Augenblick
verdunkelt es sich, ibid.). Adorno's conception of the essence of music
is hence not only subjectivist, but also transcendently theological in
a Jewish way. Nevertheless, it is only this excess of the vain attempt
to say musically the name of God that makes music more than a mere succession
of formed sounds.

Adorno therefore rejects both expressive and formal aesthetics, because
the former exhausts itself in the expression of "individual intentions"
of the subject, thus missing the "intentionless substance of the whole"
(intentionslosen Gehalt des Ganzen, S. 255), whereas "the concept 'form'
explains nothing of what is hidden, but merely shoves the question back
to what is represented in the resounding, moved interconnection, which
is more than only form" (der Begriff 'Form' erklärt nichts vom Verborgenen,
sondern schiebt bloß die Frage nach dem zurück, was sich im
tönend bewegten Zusammenhang darstellt, was mehr ist als nur Form,
ibid.). Formal aesthetics, Adorno claims, turns music into a "mere game"
(bloßes Spiel, ibid.) in all its arbitrariness and contingency, thus
failing to "point beyond itself. The quintessence of such transcendence
of the musical detail is the 'content': what happens in music" (weist [...]
über sich hinaus. Der Inbegriff solcher Transzendenz des musikalisch
Einzelnen ist der 'Inhalt': was in Musik geschieht, S. 256). Instead of
staying close to the mood that comes to resonate in music and as music, exceeding,
or rather, parallel to all understanding, Adorno is off after a transcendent, divine
content, a "most insistent 'It is so'; [...] confirmation of something
that is nevertheless not said expressly" (eine der eindringlichsten 'Das
ist so'; [...] Bestätigung eines dennoch nicht ausdrücklich Gesagten,
S. 253).

The movement of music, for Adorno, is one from the inside to the outside,
from the inwardness of subjectivity to the transcendent divine that eludes
expression. Against the formal conception of music, he points out that
there is no music "in which expressive elements did not occur" (in der
nicht expressive Elemente vorkämen, S. 255). Let us take a telling illustration
for what has been said. Adorno's disciple, Wellmer, relates in the
above-cited essay an anecdote from his piano-playing days when he
was struggling to master by sheer technique a piece by Beethoven.
His piano teacher exclaimed in exasperation, "Now listen, this is the French
Revolution!" (Wellmer op. cit. p. 107). This plea is understood in
subjectivist metaphysics as a cry to express emotion over against the demands
of mere formal technique, as an appeal to the heart to compensate for unfeeling,
technical, formal reason, and express a meaning.

Viewing the phenomena themselves, however, it easily can be seen that
this is a misinterpretation. Why? Because the French Revolution is not
an emotion coming from inside a subject that clamours for expression, but
a momentous history-making, quivering happening out there in the world
that emanates its own mood which comes to resonate grandly in music with
Beethoven. Hence the teacher says, "Listen!" — to a vibe coming from out
there. The mood of freedom is not theological and transcendent, and its
coming-to-music is not the vain attempt to speak the divine name. Rather,
the historic mood of freedom in an age is itself, coming to music excessively,
that is, in an atmospheric excess that exceeds, on its parallel way, both
understanding and language. One may call freedom divine, but only at the
risk of misunderstanding.

II.1.2 Musical technique

Adorno's view of music remains subjectivist also when he comes to consider
the role of technique and technology in the New Music. He begins his essay,
'Music and Technique/Technology',(9)
with a subjectivist recapitulation of the Greek understanding of te/xnh:
"If this [art] is the outward representation of something inward, a contextualized
sense of the phenomenon, the concept of technique/technology comprises
everything related to the realization of that inward something." (Ist diese
[Kunst] die auswendige Darstellung eines Inwendigen, ein Sinnzusammenhang
der Erscheinung, so fällt unter den Begriff der Technik alles, was
sich auf die Realisierung jenes Inwendigen bezieht, S. 229) In the case
of music, this realization of something inward is that "of the spiritual-intellectual
substance-content in the notated music as well as the [realization] through
sensuously produced sounds: thus production and reproduction. The totality
of all musical means is musical technique: the organization of the thing
itself and its translation into phenomenal manifestation" (des geistigen
Gehalts in den Noten wie die [Realisierung] durch sinnlich hervorgebrachte
Klänge: Produktion also und Reproduktion. Die Totalität aller
musikalischen Mittel ist musikalische Technik: die Organisation der Sache
selbst und deren Übersetzung in Erscheinendes, ibid.). Adorno's interpretation
of te/xnh is expressly and emphatically subjectivist,
because he insists that the ultimate "subject", the "human being" is the
producer of that "contextualized sense/meaning" (Sinnzusammenhang). The
"thing itself" that is "translated into phenomenal manifestation" is asserted
to be that "inward something", a "meaning".

Musical technique comprises all those means at the composer's disposal,
especially the "moment of ability" (Moment des Könnens, ibid.), to
bring out that "connected sense" (Sinnzusammenhang), 'Sinnzusammenhang'
being a difficult word to render adequately in English that is crucial
to what Adorno is trying to say. A sense or meaning is something comprehensible,
understandable, and this comprehensible connection is said to constitute
the core of a musical art work. This meaningful core is "geistig", i.e.
ambivalently intellectual and spiritual, since the German word 'Geist'
encompasses both 'spirit' and 'mind'. The substantial core of meaning,
of course, for Adorno, is dialectically "identical and non-identical" with
technique. Technique and the inward sense-connection are said to affect
each other, but technique remains subordinated to the task of getting the
inward meaning out.

According to Adorno, serial music was guided by the "idea of complete
predeterminacy" (Idee der vollkommenen Prädeterminiertheit, S. 246)
which he says is an "illusion because neither absolute non-ambiguity can
be constructed, nor can such a construction coincide with manifest music"
(Illusion ist, — weil weder in absoluter Eindeutigkeit sich konstruieren
läßt, noch gar eine solche Konstruktion je zusammenfiele mit
der erscheinenden Musik, ibid.). The crucial point, however, is that "predeterminacy
would have to be brought into freedom" (Prädeterminiertheit wäre
in die Freiheit einzubringen, S. 247), and this freedom is the subjective,
contextualized meaning, "an idea of the whole" (eine Idee des Ganzen, ibid.).
Total predeterminacy would "burst music out of its own element, time" (sprengte
Musik aus ihrem eigenen Element, der Zeit, heraus) reducing it to "mere
existence" (bloßes Dasein) in which "its becoming degenerated into
illusion" (ihr Werden in der Zeit verkäme zur Illusion) where the
"generation of the new" (Erzeugung des Neuen) could no longer happen (ibid.).
A recourse to the concept of indeterminacy adopted from modern physics
as a "concession" (Konzession) to limits of determinacy, Adorno asserts,
is not enough because indeterminacy "names that element where contructive
determinacy itself first finds its substrate" (benennt, woran die konstruktive
Bestimmbarkeit selber erst ihr Substrat findet, ibid.).

Against this assertion, however, it has to be asked whether music has
its subjective, inner, contextualized meaning that serves as it free-spirited
intellectual substance and substrate, or whether the content emerges from
the composer's receptivity for what comes atmospherically from the outside
to his or her spirited-intellectual ears. This would mean that the composer
is no longer the underlying subject whose creative task it is to represent
something inward on the outside, but the attuned recipient of an uncomprehended,
moodful quivering out there that can come to resonate in music by passing
through the composer who sets the artistic-musical limits that allow the
mood to resonate in music. Such a music is indeterminate insofar as it
cannot be defined within the limits of the lo/goj,
and it unfolds as a movement in time, but it is not arbitrary, relying
as it does both on the composer's genial receptiveness and technical ingenuity,
a moment of freedom, with which he or she is able to capture the mood of
a time, and also on the sensitivity with which the musicians tune in to
the composer's prescript.

II.2 Phenomenology of Western harmonic-tonal music (Georgiades)

Thrasybulos Georgiades' book Nennen und Erklingen: Die Zeit als Logos
(1985) cannot be regarded as a monograph on music aesthetics, firstly for
the simple reason that his considerations on music go back to the Greeks,
the founders of the Western theory of harmony that has formed the basis
for Western music. The phenomenon of musical harmony, in turn, is tied
to arithmetic relations, as investigated from the Pythagoreans onward.
Number, however, is not a phenomenon of the senses, an ai)sqhto/n,
but of the intellect, of nou=j. Moreover, music
is a temporal rather than a spatial phenomenon, resonating in time. Georgiades
therefore focuses on the Aristotelean phenomenology of time itself in connection
with counting and number, which is hardly an aesthetic approach that proceeds
from what the subject senses through its sensibilities. The subtitle of
Georgiades' book, "Time as Logos", indicates further that the phenomenon
of music is being approached primarily through the triad time - logos -
number.

Another author writing around the same time as Georgiades is Georg Picht,
who postulates in his 1969 article the central thesis that music is the
"representation of time" (Darstellung der Zeit, Picht 1969 p. 409). The
defence of this thesis, however, is weak, since Picht treats only superficially
the philosophical analyses of time in Plato, Aristotle and Kant, and fails
even to draw out the antinomy between time conceived as continuous and
time conceived as countably discrete. Leaving to one side the objection
that, in postulating the essence of music as a representation, Picht's
thesis already leads off the track for thinking through music as
music, even with regard to time he writes as if it could be regarded unproblematically
as a continuum. Georgiades is therefore a much more promising source for
a disputation over the essence of music as a representation of time. Chapter
I of his book, on Time, proceeds from an engagement with Aristotle's phenomenology
of time, movement and number in the Physics. In the sequel I will
follow Georgiades himself only loosely because his line of thinking is
sometimes confused and it is better to work out a clearer line so that
his genuine insights come more to the fore.

The decisive feature of Aristotle on time is that it is countable, and
therefore discrete. Time is the number counted off movement, which itself
is continuous, i.e. movement holds itself together tightly (sunexe/j)
so that there are no breaks and leaps. Each number, on the other hand,
is discretely for itself, separated off from the other numbers (Eldred
2009/2011 § 2.1). Georgiades cites Aristotle's famous definition of
time as "the number of movement according to before and after" (Georgiades
p. 29), which implies a counting movement in which there is a movement,
at the very least, from one to its successor, two, with 2 coming after
1. Time, however, is never finally, perfectly counted (h)riqmhme/non
p. 33, Phys.. D 14;223a25); it goes on
endlessly being counted (a)riqmou/menon). As
the movement continues, the discrete counting continues.

Movement, however, can be simply the inner movement of the soul (ki/nhsij
de/ tij e)n t$= yux$= e)n$=Phys.D 11;219a5)
itself, which is a continuous, pure, uneventful whiling (Währen, p.
49). This whiling is marked in the mind by the ever-recurring nows that
are counted off discretely as they arrive. Hence, Aristotle notes, "if
nothing other of its nature can count except the psyche, i.e. the psyche's
mind, it is impossible that time could be if the psyche did not exist"
(ei) de\ mhde\n a)/llo pe/fuken a)riqmei=n h)\ yuxh\
kai\ yuxh=j nou=j, a)du/naton ei)=nai xro/non yuxh=j mh\ ou)/shj
223a25). Time is only in the belonging-together of being (ei)=nai)
and mindful taking-in (noei=n), of movement
(ki/nhsij) and counting (a)riqmei=n).
Georgiades puts this by saying that time is only "real" as a counting (p.
33), which is misleading insofar as in counting no res (real thing)
is involved. The mind gets a defining grip on continuous movement/change
by discrete counting of the endless recurrence of the same (to\
au)to/n, nu=n, now) as difference (e(/teron,
a later now). The ever-recurring, counted now is, in the first place, the
recurring of the time of day when the sun or the fixed stars return to
the same position in the sky. This makes the counting uniform, and thus
time is the even, uniform, counted procession of days. The day as unit
of counted time can be subdivided into smaller and smaller units, and counted
off perceptibly quicker movements or changes. In principle, any movement,
whether regular or not, can be taken as the unit for counting time. A regular,
periodic, recurring movement, however, is "most familiar" (gnwrimw/tatoj
223b20) for an even counting of time for which the now-instants arrive
with a steady drum beat.

As Aristotle analyzes, movement itself is characterized by a double
(dixw=jPhys. G
1;201a3) presence of what is present now and the lack (ste/rhsij)
of where the movement has not yet arrived, which is thus a present absence.
Since time itself is a counting movement, it is always under
way toward the next, still absent now-instant that is to arrive and
be counted. The undifferentiated whiling movement is thus punctuated by
the mind's discrete, ongoing, forever unfinished (a)telh/j)
counting movement of Aristotelean time itself as the instants arrive one
after the other. The mind has to distinguish, at the very least, in its
counting movement, the earlier now from the later now, for time to be.
The mind thus retains earlier nows and is prospectively under
way toward later nows, but Aristotle does not treat the absently present
dimensions of past and future in which these retained or projected nows
are embedded as temporal dimensions in their own right, defining time instead
as discrete counting for which only the present now properly is.

II.2.1 Rhythm in tonal music

If Western music — according to Picht's thesis that is tantamount to an
obfuscation of the making way of music as music to music (cf. Part I) —
is to be conceived (metaphysically) as a "representation of time" — a thesis
expounded by Georgiades' book — then it will itself be a counting movement
in which the before and after have a relation to each other, and, since
music is an art form, this counting movement will be perceptible to the
senses, above all, the sense of hearing. Thus music will be a sensuous
presencing of time itself as a sensuously audible counting movement. Western
music is counting time. Such a conception of music is wedded essentially
to the Aristotelean conception of time as an endless counting movement,
an ontological casting of time that has not been broken with even in advanced
modern physics (cf. Eldred 2009/2011 § 2.9). The counting movement
is marked for the ear by the relation of whiling tones to one another
as they are produced and heard in succession. A tone itself is a pure sound
that is pure in the sense that i) it has a pitch and ii) it is 'for itself',
'self-contained' or separated off from the referential aspect of noises
in the world as always being the noise of something in the environment
and thus as indicative of something which the noise is not. When I hear
a noise, it is the noise of a car, a person, a fly, etc., whereas a tone
is simply for itself, self-contained, as of a certain high or low pitch,
and abstracted from the world of things. Hence a musical tone is
a note.

Not even the timbre of the particular musical instrument generating
the tone is initially included in this conception of pure, abstract tone
which is amenable to being brought into (harmonic; see below) relation
with pure number, which is likewise abstracted from qualities. If music
is a sensuous presencing of time, it can be such only as a counting movement
of tones that thereby have a numerical, counted relation to one another
in the sequence of ongoing tones. Musical tones must be placed in ongoing,
counted time according to strict, ordinal numbers, and also have a numerically
measured duration. Even the sustained whiling of a pure tone is, and must
be, counted musically, whereas a sustained staccato of a tone of unvarying
pitch already contains its own implicit, audible counting. The counting
underlying the musical movement of tones is reflected in the bars
of notated Western music, along with their regular subdivisions into, say,
quarter, eighth or sixteenth notes, that constitute the units for counting
such movement in a precise, regular way. The duration of a note
is counted by numerical divisions of a bar. Such counting of both tones
and silent pauses is the rhythmic basis of Western tonal music, which always
maintains its numerically precise relations, no matter how complicated
the rhythm becomes, even when the rhythms of different instruments are
complexly superposed. Even rhythmic syncopation with its off-beats, and
grace notes are still governed by the basic rhythm as its precisely posited,
controlled deviations.

II.2.2 Harmony in tonal music

The precise, countable rhythm is only one aspect of the arithmetical nature
of Western tonal music. The other is its harmonic structure, that
goes back to the Pythagoreans, who first investigated harmonic ratios.
If music is to be composed of tones posited within counted time, these
tones themselves have a relation to one another. They are pro/j
ti. This observation again brings us back to Aristotle, who provides
an overview of the category of relation in the fifteenth chapter of Book
Delta of his Metaphysics. This concise chapter includes discussion
of the relations, i.e. ratios, of numbers (a)riqmoi/)
to one another, which can be either definite (w(risme/noj
1020b34) or indefinite (a)o/riston 1021a4),
and that in two ways: either as a multiple (pollapla/sion
1021a3) or in exceeding another number by one part (e)pimo/rion
1021a2) as its successor. A definite multiple is e.g. threefold, whereas
an indefinite multiple is n-fold, i.e. always a multiple in relation to
the starting-point (a)rxh/) of counting, which
is one (pollapla/sion pro\j to\ e(/n 1021a3).
As the principle and measure for counting, one itself is not regarded as
a number, the first number in the movement of counting itself, starting
from the starting-point, being two.

An example of a definite succession is the relation of 3 to 2, 3 being
the e)pimo/rion of 2, which is thus the u(pepimo/rion
(1021a2). The indefinite relation of succeeding (e)pimo/rion
pro\j to\ u(pepimo/rion 1021a2) is the ratio of n+1 to n. Simple
counting 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. results in the succession of counting numbers,
whereas the rational counting of 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, etc. results in the
countable succession of successor ratios. Both sequences, however,
are very simple, countable sequences. The multiples of one could be regarded
as the basis of the rhythm of tonal music as the tones arrive in
counted time, whereas the successor ratio (n+1)/n is the key to Western
harmony
that regulates how the successive tones' pitches relate to each other harmonically.
This is the approach that Georgiades pursues, above all in two sections
of his Chapter IIa. on Tone, viz. "Harmonia" (pp. 58-64) and "Zum abendländischen
Tonsystem" (On the Western tonal system pp. 77-80).

If Western music consists of pitched tones whiling and resounding in
counted time, then the tones themselves are sensuous, aural markers marking
the progress of counted time not just by being repeated at regular counted
intervals that result in a rhythm but also by marking the difference
between earlier and later. Tones as purified and abstracted from noise
have a pitch, and hence the difference in tones in the course of counted
musical time is a difference in pitch. If music is to be a sensuous
presencing of counted time, which is itself kind of movement, this movement
can only become perceptible if it is marked also by difference which must
be the abstracted difference of pure pitch. The tones composing the music
present differences in pitch. Hence the later tone heard has a relation
to the earlier one, and a tone succeeding the previous one has a difference
in pitch that bears a numerical relation to its predecessor that, in order
to be true to music as a presencing of counted time, must itself be captured
by a counted arithmetic ratio which, most primitively, is the successor
ratio resulting from forming the ratio between the successor in the process
of counting to the predecessor number, i.e. either (n+1)/n itself, or some
neat arithmetical variation thereof. The harmonic ratios are therefore
expressed in the simple countable sequence 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, 6/5, 7/6,...,
their inversions and certain simple doublings (p. 78). If the pitch ratio
(n+1)/n is to remain sensuously audible, of course, n must not become too
large, as we shall see in more detail below.

It may be noted that, since for Greek arithmetic, one is the principle
for counting and two is the first number, the first successor ratio can
only be 2/1, and not 1/0, which presumably would correspond to the difference
of an audible tone succeeding silence. This would be indeed an audible
difference in the ongoing counting of time, and thus mark a difference,
but it would be, at the same time, indeterminate, just as the ratio 1/0
is. In other words, silence itself has no place in the system of Western
harmony as a sensibly audible presencing of countable time, and must be
experienced simply as the lack (ste/rhsij) or
suspended (suspenseful) absence of tone, i.e. a pause.

The first audible difference in succeeding tones arises from the successor
ratio of 2 to 1 which, at the same time, is a simple multiple of the first
tone, or tonic, 1. The tonal system is relational (pro/j
ti) and not absolute or for itself (kaq" au(to/),
so that the tonic does not have an absolute pitch but, once chosen as harmonic
key, generates the harmonic relations of all the other tones to it, just
as the one (e(/n) does in counting. The first
tonal successor is the octave which is simultaneously a doubling, i.e.
simply the audibly same tone, but an octave higher. The octave is produced
tonally by dividing a string in the ratio 2 to 1. This is the first harmonic
tonal difference, which is also an arithmetic difference expressed as the
simplest of arithmetic ratios. Two tones an octave apart belong to each
other harmonically; they 'make sense' and are 'logical' by virtue of having
a logical-arithmetic relation between. The next successor ratio in the
countable sequence is 3/2, which gives the quint or dominant relative to
the tonic. The quint is dominant in the harmonic belonging-together of
the tones simply by virtue of being the first successor ratio after the
octave. After 3/2 comes 4/3, which gives the fourth, quart or subdominant.
Tonic, octave, dominant, subdominant, major third and minor third belong
to each other harmonically just as the ratios 1/1, 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4,
6/5 succeed one another in a counting process.

The harmony of tones hence corresponds to a succession of arithmetic
ratios which in turn corresponds to time itself cast as the steady counting
of now-instants arriving in presence. In this way, time itself is given
a logical-arithmetic structure, which is also audible in harmonic music.
Georgiades asserts (p. 64) that the ratios investigated by the ancient
Greek mathematicians, the Pythagoreans, resulted from their sensuous, aisthetic
experience of the phenomena of tonal relations, but there is no need to
assert any causal order here, but only a correspondence between audible
and arithmetic ratios. Both are lo/goi in the
sense of ratios, and that is not causally explicable, but is a sending
from beyng, an historical destiny.

Georgiades notes the bifurcation of the meaning of lo/goj
into arithmetic ratio (harmony) and word (p. 63), from which also his bifurcation
of chapters into IIa Tone and III Naming (Nennen) (which, in the first
place, is the naming of 'this here', or Diesda, the title of Chap. IIb)
as well as the bifurcated title of his book, Naming and Sounding (Nennen
und Erklingen) are derived. There is a logic to harmonic relations, a lo/goj
a)riqmw=n; they are rational in an arithmetic sense. The two numbers
set into (harmonic) relation to one another are called o(/roi,
or limits. The lo/goj as rational arithmetic
relation delimits and, in so doing, gives rational contour to sounds as
tones, holding them together rationally. What lies outside the limits of
a rational, harmonic ratio sounds illogical, irrational; it makes no musical
sense and is disharmonic, awful-sounding music. This becomes the Western
experience and sensibility to music, which is a logical, lo/goj-mediated,
sensuous experience of a world whose sounds and noise are purified to tones
and brought into logical order. Counting things in the world — 1, 2, 3,
4, 5, 6 and so on — gives rise to abstract arithmetic quantity in natural
numbers, whereas listening to the ratios between tones gives rise to audible,
logical, arithmetic, harmonic ratios: 1/1, 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, 6/5 and
so on.

As Georgiades expounds (p. 78), the Western harmonic system is generated
wholly by successor ratios. This system remains closed only for the numbers
up to 6 in the sense that all the ratios of the counting numbers 1 to 6
are either successor ratios or their inversions (e.g. the inversion of
the fifth, 3/2, is 2/3=1/2x4/3, which is a fourth lowered an octave, or
5/6, the inversion of a minor third), or can be brought back to a successor
ratio by dividing or multiplying by a multiple of 2, i.e. by octave displacement
(e.g. 3/4=1/2x3/2 is the inversion of a fourth and also a fifth lowered
an octave, or 5/2=2x5/4, i.e. a major third raised an octave, or 5/1=2x2x5/4,
i.e. a major third raised two octaves, or 6/1=2x2x3/2, i.e. a quint/fifth
raised two octaves). Once 7 is added to the set of generators, the closure
breaks down because 7/5 cannot be generated from successor ratios according
to the rules. The ancient Greek harmonic system is generated already from
1, 2 and 3 to give the Pythagorean tetraktys: 1/1, 2/1, 3/2 and 4/3=(2x2)/3,
the inversion of 3/2. The Western harmonic system goes further to generate
the major and minor thirds, 5/4 and 6/5, and the large and small whole
tones by dividing the major third: 9/8 x 10/9=5/4. Differences are added,
such as the semitone, which is the difference between the fourth and the
major third: (4/3) / (5/4)=16/15. Through such refinements, the harmonic
system remains nevertheless arithmetically rational, logical in the sense
that it is generated by simple operations on countable successor ratios.

Harmony is the 'fitting together' (Zusammenfügung p. 61) of tones
according to simple arithmetic successor ratios. The fit may be under tension
(pali/ntropoj a(rmoni/h o(/kwsper to/cou kai\ lu/rhj.
"contro-versial harmony like that of the bow and lyre" Herakleitos Frag.
51), so that the tones have a tendency both to fit together and also to
fly apart. Harmonic dissonances still belong to harmony insofar as they
remain governed by its rules precisely as deviant exceptions which are
also heard as such. Throughout the course of Western history, the
harmonic system has undergone several modifications and extensions, none
of which, however, breaks entirely with the simple arithmetic ratios of
Pythagorean harmony. Arithmetic harmony is the a)rxh/
(beginning and principle) that governs all Western music that comes after
it. It maintains its hold despite all changes and major modifications of
the harmonic system such as the tempered tuning for keyboard instruments.

The harmonic ratios govern also the formation of chords and counterpoint
in Western music, since the notes of a chord, the notes of a melody and
also the contrapuntal notes in polyphonic melody lines have harmonically
governed relations to one another. Because harmonic logic is relative,
there are harmonic keys within which the arithmetic harmonic relations
are defined relative to the tonic, thus prescribing which notes
belong together in each (major or minor) key. The orthodox distinction
made between the harmony of the vertical (simultaneous) notes of a chord
and the counterpoint of horizontal (consecutive) polyphonic melody lines
is itself situated within the arithmetic harmony that governs which tones
belong to one another, no matter whether they resound simultaneously or
consecutively. In musicology there is an inherent positivist tendency to
get lost in the details of historical changes in Western music and its
theory rather than asking the simple question as to what the essence of
Western music is that underlies all these changes.

Western music absorbs many influences from all over as the world expands
through European trade and colonization, enabled by decisive technologies
such as navigation, ship-building and ballistics, but these influences,
say, from Africa, the Orient or the Americas, only modify Western harmony
and give it a certain flavour. Today's music, from classical through jazz,
blues, and rock to commercial pop songs is still music ruled by harmony,
no matter how much harmonic rules are bent. It is rational music.
Popular music is popular because its musical sense is easily understood
as based on simple harmonic ratios of tonic, fifth, fourth, major third
and minor third.

II.2.3 Logically notated music

Another principal meaning of lo/goj is 'word'.
Western music is cast not only as arithmetically harmonic, but also as
logically prescribed, an aspect not investigated by Georgiades. The pure
tones from which Western music is composed according to rules of harmonic
ratios can also be notated. The temporal counting of musical rhythm
and the definition of tones' pitches according to harmonic ratios together
enable (and necessitate) a notated music that is thus logically defined
and definite also in the sense of being written down as a prescription
for how the music is to be played. Such notation is only possible because
music is composed of tones that themselves can be logically defined, i.e.
delimited. Notated music can also be read without any music sounding. The
musical mind can experience harmonic music silently by reading and also
by composing notes mentally according to harmonic rules. Problems in composition
can be solved as mental exercises depending on the mind's mastery of lo/goj
in the double sense of harmonic ratio and defined, notated note.

Notated music allows a division of labour between the composer and the
musician, who thus becomes a logical interpreter of a composed prescript
for the music to be musicked. The musical work of art, in the first place,
has a written, notated form as score. The score lays down harmonic
limits and enables the composer to be a composer as the creator
of an art work not confined to its actual performance. A musical performance
is the execution of a logical prescript that can be judged aesthetically
in its own right according to how it sounds, which depends on how well
and how sensitively the musicians, including the conductor, interpret the
score.

The notated nature of the music, and the logical belonging-together
of the notes both harmonically and in counted time, necessitates a time-keeper
for the music to assure the co-ordination of the prescribed score. This
time-keeper is the conductor, who commands the unified interpretation of
the score and whose skill is judged in the first place when assessing the
success or failure of a particular performance of a musical art work.

II.2.4 Words set to harmonic music

Yet a further aspect of the musical lo/goj is
where lo/goj understood as harmonic ratio is
combined with lo/goj understood as language
to give words set to music. There is then a meaning in the words that is
set to music in such a way that there is a correspondence. The correspondence
concerns the saying of the words as an harmonic, rhythmic singing. The
text of a song brings into play lyrical metre, i.e. the rhythm of poetic
saying with the voice, which must match the rhythm of the playing of the
musical notes. Moreover, the sung words are ascribed definite, pitched
tones of definite duration which can be notated. There is thus a threefold
correspondence between the words and the music: syllables and notes, metre
and counted rhythm, meaning and harmonic structure, whereby the last becomes
nebulous.

It is asked whether the meaning of the song's words resonates appropriately
in the music heard. This is principally a matter of a match between the
mood of the text and the mood of the harmonic music, such as sad, merry,
melancholy, celebratory, etc. etc. Certain conventions arise that prescribe
what is a suitable setting to music of a text, perhaps the main one being
that minor harmonies are sad, whereas major harmonies are cheerful. Chords
built on minor thirds or major thirds are thus given a certain moodful
meaning. The correspondence between the mood of a text and the mood of
a piece of music encourages the misunderstanding that music itself is a
language that can be employed to express feelings, just as words can be
employed to express opinions and thoughts.

In so doing, the bifurcated meaning of lo/goj
as both word and arithmetic ratio is elided, and meanings are put into
harmonic music, as if the moodful quivering of music could be contained
within words or, conversely, lyrical poetry did not say more moodfully
than its meaningful words. This misunderstanding can only be remedied by
keeping in mind that human being is open to the world in a twofold way:
both through understanding and attunement. This twofold may be in correspondence
or it may be at odds. Twentieth century vocal music has experimented much
with vocalise for which the sung voice is disburdened of conveying a verbal
meaning. The voice thus becomes like an instrument whose sound evokes certain
moods that are not necessarily subjective emotions. Because the voice is
the most natural of musical instruments, however, its vocalise singing
is closely associated with the expression of emotion, i.e. as emanating
from a human subject. Such expression of emotion is nevertheless itself
always a response to a situation that is taken in by moodful understanding.

II.2.5 The dissolution of arithmetic harmony in the
mathematical continuum

A major change takes place with the modern mathematical measurement of
frequency, which means approximating the continuum of sound waves, something
foreign to the Greek arithmetic, discrete harmonies. The musical tone is
transformed from a pure sound describable by a simple arithmetic ratio
to become a sound wave describable mathematically by a numerical frequency
measured by the number of vibrations per second (Hertz), along with other
parameters. The simple ratio of 3/2 defining the quint relative
to the tonic, for example, becomes the absolute frequency of a sound
wave measured as number of oscillations per second, such as 392 Hz. for
the quint G in the key of C. Modern mathematical physics alters the basic
conception of harmony which, as mathematical rather than arithmetic, becomes
ultimately arbitrary, thus enabling many different harmonic systems which,
however, nevertheless remain describable by numbers.

Modern mathematics was developed to grasp the continuum of real numbers
in order to develop laws of motion, and it achieves success in the arithmetization
of geometry through mathematical calculus in the nineteenth century (Eldred
2009/2011 § 2.8). In Greek thinking, by contrast, the continuum was
the domain of geometry, not arithmetic. The dissolution of Western harmony
thus begins from within Western music itself, rather than through any outside
influences. The simple discreteness of harmonic ratios gives way to the
more complicated, and ultimately arbitrary ratios arising from sound waves
through to electronic waves generated by an oscilloscope, a transformation
that may be described as progressive approximation of discrete number to
the real continuum. The pure, pitched tone describable relationally through
an harmonic ratio to the tonic becomes a continuous sine wave. Unbeknowns
to composers, the consummation and dissolution of Western harmonic music
was prepared historically by momentous shifts in mathematics related to
physics' grappling with the problem of motion.

The first historical step outside Western tonal harmony was into so-called
atonality, which is a misnomer insofar as atonal music is still composed
entirely of tones. Rather, the relations among the tones are no longer
governed by the laws of harmony. Properly speaking, therefore, atonal music
(e.g. Berg) should be called anharmonic music, i.e. composed tones outside
the government of harmonic ratios.

II.2.6 Making way to harmonic-tonal music

So far it should have become plainly visible that the essence of Western
tonal music resides in simple arithmetic harmony based originally on successor
ratios and an ordering within counted time. The essence of music is therefore
nothing musical, but arithmetic, rational, logical, where lo/goj
is understood in one of its Greek senses as arithmetic ratio. Tonally harmonic
music is a presencing of countable time in a rational, arithmetically governed
movement of tones.

What does this mean for the making way of music to music as thought
through in the first part of this study? The path of thinking led finally
to the formula: Making-way brings music (the fugue as the wesende of
music) as music (quivering) to music (resounding song). The fugue was
the entire manifold of originary tunes held together and adjoined in the
articulated unity of that urfugue which resonates through and originarily
opens up the free dimension of attunement that comes to resonate in manifold
attunements. Quivering was the temporal attuning of a mood that attunes
human being itself, thus enpropriating human being as musical to the urfugue.

Thought now with respect to the essence of specifically Western tonal-harmonic
music, for which music is a representational presencing of counted time,
the formula becomes: Making-way brings music (the urfugue as the harmonically
articulated join of originary tunes governed by the lo/goi of arithmetic
ratios in counted time) as music (the quivering whiling of time that harmoniously
and disharmoniously attunes human being) to music (harmonically tonal,
tuneful, attuned, rhythmic music).

Western tonal music is therefore in tune and in step with counted time
structured by the originary, harmonic urfugue sent as the metaphysical
destiny of Western music. The counting of time renders music rhythmic.
The pitched beats of the counting are governed by logical harmonic intervals
expressed in arithmetic ratios. Western music is a counted, tonally fulfilled
movement that presences time audibly as counted, harmonically structured
time, and therefore re-presents it, as if time were irrevocably counted
time, i.e. the ongoing, regular, simply rhythmic presencing and vanishing
of now-instants that now, on making way to music, resonate harmonically
in audible music and for which not only the earlier now and later now are
linked through counting, but the tones resounding at these earlier and
later moments are harmonically linked through certain harmonically 'lawful'
arithmetic ratios.

Harmonic music is joined together according to the arithmetic ratios
of the urfugue as the logical adjoining of originary, historically granted,
harmonic tunes residing in the possibilities of harmonic ratio, and therefore
lets the world resound moodfully in specifically harmonically tuneful and
attuning ways to which we Western human beings have long since been historically
attuned. We move and resonate therefore in harmony with counted time, attuned
to the harmonically joined originary tunes of the urfugue that grants music
through the quivering of whiling time punctuated by the urfugue's counting
and the urfugue's admissible harmonies.

Our time-space reverberates harmonically with moods that make way to
harmonic-tonal music which, in turn, makes rational sense to us in the
sense of the tuneful, resounding movement of harmonically related pure
notes in counted time. What lies altogether outside resonance with the
originary harmonic, logical urfugue is understood and felt as unharmonious,
unmusical noise, as unmusic that grates on us as out of tune. Disharmony
is employed in harmonic music to create an interesting tension within the
harmony, bending it to avoid boredom. The underlying criterion for Western
music is harmonic, arithmetic ratio, and not simply Western customs and
conventions of what sounds harmonious to the ear, which is by and large
a matter of habit that gains the weight of tradition to the point of becoming
musical second nature. The experienced harmoniousness of music is merely
an habituated reflection of the harmonic-arithmetic urfugue of Western
music.

Up to the end of the nineteenth century, Western composers composed
harmonically by listening to the harmonic urfugue, exploring its 'logical'
possibilities, discovering its outlying limits to exploit its musical possibilities,
adding refinements to how harmony is to be defined. Composers' listening
in this sense is a listening of the mind to the logical-harmonic urfugue,
which the mind translates into composed music that, when musicked, allows
a mood of (dis)harmony to reverberate. Composers fathomed to outermost
reaches of harmonic laws up to the limits of dissonant harmony in order
to allow the possibilities of harmonic music to actually make way to listening
human ears.

The originary fugue of Western metaphysical, harmonic music is hence
not a human musicking, but the music of the harmonic urfugue itself. Human
harmonic composing and musicking is only a response to having already listened
to the harmonic urfugue and having been attuned by it. The originary fugue
needs humankind to come to resounding, audible harmony and disharmony,
and only human being — in the first place historically, Western human being
— is in tune with the harmonic urfugue to which Western human being belongs.
However, as already mentioned, in the modern age totally permeated by mathematical
science, counted time approximates ever more closely the continuum of time's
whiling, and tones come to be cast as sound waves of certain arithmetically
determinate frequencies which likewise are conceived simply as positions
on a continuous spectrum rather than numbers with simple arithmetic relations
to one another. Moreover, pure sounds are no longer only the tones produced
by musicians playing musical instruments, but can be generated and controlled
by electronic devices that operate within the continuum of sound waves
rather than in the harmonically structured, rational space of tones. As
harmonic tonal music in the nineteenth century fathoms more and more the
furthest reaches of the harmonic urfugue as the essence of Western music,
the limits are reached. The historical paradigm shift in the casting of
time from discretely counted time to a real time continuum undermines the
urfugue of Western harmony.

Beyond lies an other music whose urfugue no longer can be characterized
as harmonic. An alternative urfugue is under way to historical human being
to which certain composers listen, letting themselves be attuned by it.
This alternative urfugue has not yet shaped up definitely. The alternatives
of twelve-tone, serial and aleatoric music — as well as sound art composed
not just of tones but of noises (e.g. musique concrète) — appear
and begin to be explored, thus breaking with Western music as it has been
hitherto listened to, understood and enjoyed. What is underway in Western
music?

II.3 New Music is the Other Music (Cage)

If Western harmonic, tonal music has been dissolving progressively over
centuries in the approximation of discrete tone to the continuity of sound
and counted time itself has been cast increasingly, albeit incoherently,
as a real continuum in the quest of mathematical physics to master movement
of all kinds (Eldred 2009/2011 § 2.8), including even musical movement,
an other essencing of music is arriving along with an other granting of
time itself. This other essencing as the getting-over (Verwindung) of Western
metaphysical, harmonic music initially can be characterized negatively
as illogical, irrational, which accounts also for the enormous resistance
to the arrival of another historical essencing of music. It is time to
take up Picht's thesis of "a new manifestation of the essence of time which,
in turn, comprises within itself everything that is" (eine neue Erscheinung
des Wesens der Zeit, die wiederum alles, was ist, in sich begreift, Picht
1969 p. 416) in the attempt to spell out what this thesis could mean. New
Music goes hand in hand with an historical recasting of the essence of
time beyond the metaphysical essencing of discretely counted or continuously
linear time.

Presumably, Western humankind is still preparing itself for this recasting
in which counted clock-time or even real, linear, continuous time would
fade from the scene and time as whiling would attune, thus enabling the
experience that: whiling whiles. No longer would counted time, punctuated
by counting, intoned by rationally related tones be at the forefront. Nor
would time be a parameter for controlled continuous movement. The listening
musical mind would not hear a sequence of counted, harmonically related
rational tones, but rather would wander, through the power of imagination,
back and forth in the whiling of time. The one musically audible now would
no longer be tied logically, through rhythm and harmony, to the earlier
or later musically audible now. The whiling of time would be compatible
with the musicking of music itself. This thought will be further explored
in the sequel.

There is a whole sequence of twentieth century composers who came up
against the limits of Western tonal harmony and explored musical steps
beyond. The list includes Schönberg, Berg, Webern, Satie, Varèse,
Boulez, Stockhausen, Schaeffer, Feldman, to name only some of the most
prominent earlier names, but John Cage's name, perhaps, stands out from
the rest as the most radical and the most articulate and eloquent in saying
in words what is happening to music in his and our time.(10)
There was a straining at the limits of harmony already noticeable in the
nineteenth century, when dissonances were explored within the chromatic
scale to the point where an exhaustion of harmonic potential in composition
became apparent. In the early twentieth century, the corset of harmony
was shuffled off, and music frolicked in subsequent decades discovering
a hitherto unknown freedom of movement. Cage's teacher, Schönberg,
took the theoretically formulated step beyond harmony by granting 'equal
rights' to each tone in the twelve-tone chromatic scale, thus breaking
the harmonic dominion of the tonic, dominant and subdominant over the other
tones. The tones nevertheless remain related to one another in twelve-tone
technique through the prime series that remains the a)rxh/
of the composition. Only certain operations on the prime series are allowed
in dodecaphonic composition such as transposition up or down, reversal,
inversion and overlapping superposition of parts of the series. The music
also remains tonal in the sense of being composed entirely of pitched tones.
Insofar, the term 'atonal music' is a misnomer.

The twelve-tone composition technique was radicalized, again without
leaving the realm of tone altogether, in serial music, by subjecting not
only pitch, but also other musical parameters to compositional control.
The dissolution of harmonic arithmetic ratios in the continuum of number
and the extension of the dominion of the musical a)rxh/
into a polyarchy are shown by the specification of the parameters of serial
music as "frequency, duration, intensity, timbre and sequence" (Frequenz,
Dauer, Intensität, Timbre und Sequenz; Metzger 'John Cage oder Die
freigelassene Musik' I 1990 p. 8). The multiplication of musical parameters
demands the departure from simple harmonic, arithmetic ratios because these
other parameters can only be grasped mathematically by real numbers, not
just by counting numbers and their simple successor ratios. The pitch of
a tone expressible as an harmonic ratio relative to the tonic thus becomes
a "frequency". Rhythm is no longer a counting pattern punctuating the counting
of time, but becomes "duration" that can be measured, specified and collaged
with arbitrary precision by clock-time. Intensity is measured in the continuum
of decibels. Timbre, or the colour of a tone, is harder to capture mathematically,
but is not beyond the grasp of a specification in terms of a set of characteristics
of sound wave functions that will come into its own with electronic music.
Finally, sequence can be specified arithmetically, but only as a permutation
that mixes up natural ordinal counting.(11)
Such permutations are the subject of combinatorial mathematics. Serial
music is enthused and inspired by the prospect of total mathematical prescription
of the movement of tones that goes beyond what tonal harmonic composition
traditionally sought to control, namely, a movement of tones whose pitch
and rhythm are governed by arithmetically specifiable harmonic ratios and
rhythmic patterns.

If the scandalizing dodecaphonic and serial musics, which shocked their
publics by violating conventions of harmonic musical propriety, still kept
to pitched tones, it was an even more shocking event when noise was permitted
entry to music (e.g. the elaborate percussion and siren sounds in Varèse's
Ionisation
ca. 1930). The break-in of noise is experienced not for the first time,
but nevertheless very graphically, undeniably, simply and observably, with
Cage's compositions for prepared piano. The strings prepared with bolts,
screws, erasers, pegs, paper, etc. destroy the pure, pitched tone in favour
of a noise with its more mathematically complex sound wave. The musical
piece thus gains a percussive, 'gamelan' flavour in which the prepared
strings provide percussive rhythm. Countable rhythm is thus maintained.
The musical art work itself displays the break with harmonic ratios which,
of their nature, can apply only to (the pitches of) tones.

II.3.1 The absolute zero of musical time-space

Another of Cage's pieces, his famous 4'33" consisting of the 'absolute
zero' of 273 seconds of uncomposed time-space that can occur anywhere at
any time, displays to the aural and visual senses and the mind's ear a
radically other casting of music whose parameters are no longer
tonal or harmonic, but pure aural openness to the world's time-space. The
borderline between the art work and the everyday world is also crossed
in this work that consists simply of a simple, definite, radical idea
in whose light the essence of music shows itself differently. As a work
of art, 4'33" declares a defined space in time to be an art
work. This space in time as an art work requires the presence of listeners
open to this delimited time-space. The delimitation is performed by a precisely
specified number that marks out in counted clock-time a time interval in
an infinite sequence of counted moments: from now at zero seconds, to now,
273 seconds later. Insofar, this art work still relies on the lo/goj
of an arithmetic relation that marks out a segment of time-space through
counted time.

The mind has to set limits to see an art work at all, and in this case,
the limits are set by a)riqmo/j that enables
an art work to stand and show itself from within its defined limits. But,
within this counted segment of time-space, what eventuates is only the
attentive openness for time-space itself. The numerically defined time-frame
is not filled with pitched tones structured according to harmonic ratios
and countable rhythm, but with any sounds at all that may occur which are
thus defined by the time-frame to be music. If the piece is performed in
a concert hall, certain sounds will naturally occur; if it is performed
on a traffic island at the centre of a busy metropolis, other sounds will
naturally occur. Such sounds, however, are not musicked by musicians. The
essence of music as the urfugue in its mood-granting quivering, in this
case, does not make way to resounding, humanly musicked music but simply
to attentive ears. What eventuates is not merely that certain naturally
occuring sounds or noises are heard, but that the time-space is inevitably
attuned in one way or other. The time-space itself quivers in its whiling
that variously attunes the audience as music itself musics. In this piece,
music is not a human activity of producing tones or even sounds, but rather,
here human being belongs to the musicking of music itself.

The listeners are attuned during the 273 seconds in some way or other,
not necessarily uniformly. Although the listening audience is gathered
together, perhaps in a concert hall, perhaps via a radio transmission,
perhaps loosely at some venue, it remains a disparate 'we'. Attentiveness
for the demarcated time-space here and now, listening to the noises from
the surroundings, is only one possibility among many. Inattentiveness is
another possibility, probably the predominant one. The listener's mind
may wander in both time and space freely beyond the work's segment of time-space
as defined by clock-time. Its inattentiveness means that it is not in the
here-and-now, but elsewhere elsewhen, i.e. somewhere else at some other
time in the future or past. The mind wanders by absenting itself from here-and-now
and presencing other times and other places, which is what the mind does
naturally, ranging freely over the three dimensions of time. In presencing
what has been, what will be, what may be, what may have been, the mind
is absent, rambling through the folds of time. The whiling of time is not
merely the steady buzz of the present along the wire of a linear temporal
continuum, but the distinctly three-dimensional temporal space in its indeterminate
openness and three-dimensional degrees of freedom in which each member
of the audience finds him- or herself attuned in one mode and mood or another.

Cage's piece 4'33" redefines, recasts music by means of a simple
time-frame specified by clock-time, analogously to how a piece of the wall
can be declared to be a 'painted' art work simply by hanging a picture
frame on it, or a pissoir can be declared to be a sculptural art work.
The definition of a musical art work by specifying a time-frame leaves
everything else open. It has already been noted that a listening audience
cannot be confined to the here and now of the specified time-frame, but
inevitably wanders temporally also to other places. It is nevertheless
also attuned variously here and now in moods of irritation, impatience,
curiosity, expectancy, serenity, anxiety, boredom, etc. that may have little
to do with what is currently being heard. Insofar as it listens to the
present noises occurring naturally, these noises present themselves ungoverned
by harmonic ratios, rhythmic patterns or any other compositorial directive.
They are also not pure, but refer to happenings in the surroundings such
as the sound of traffic, of doors closing, of someone coughing.

4'33" is the most extreme negation of harmonic, tonal music possible
through an abstraction into the framed nothingness of pure indeterminancy.
The simultaneity of tones forming an harmonic chord is abolished along
with the consecutive tones forming an harmonic arpeggio. The harmonically
governed sequence of tones forming an harmonious melody and the contrapuntal
superposition of harmonically governed, tuneful sequences are likewise banished.
There is no development, no climax, no finale, no logical beginning, middle
and end. Compositorial dominion over sound has been abdicated. There are
no musicians musicking in a co-ordinated way with one another according
to compositorial instructions, nor producing tones or sounds in a definite
sequence. 4'33" seems to be a total negation of all music. All that
is left is the specified segment of time-space that frames the work, which
could be regarded as its a)rxh/. Otherwise it
is anarchic. It is as if this segment of time-space itself musics.(12)
It can do so only if someone listens to and willy nilly allows himself
or herself to be attuned by it. There must be a listener who belongs to
the musicking of music itself, which is the quivering of propriation. Thus
does 4'33" recast music from scratch. Human being belongs, is enpropriated
to propriation by way of its attuning human being, thus opening human being
moodfully to the world.

Another of John Cage's works which is much more structured, complex
and specified than 4'33" is his Il Treno di John Cage, a
three-day train trip organized in northern Italy in 1978 as a festival
at which also music and dance in the usual sense, but mostly the noises
of the train itself, both exterior and interior (in the carriages), made
the music. The train was prepared with microphones and loud-speakers inside
and outside the carriages to transmit noises. People at towns along the
train's route took part in the festivities each time the train stopped
and, of course, there were also the passengers on the train itself who
made their own noise — their conversations were not part of the music.
In his detailed description of this Cagean happening, Daniel Charles makes
the insightful remark, "Now let us stop at this concept of space and emptiness.
It designates a space of encounter, and the forward and return journies
of The Train of John Cage in any case have the merit of having made
a way, laid down a track — no matter how predetermined this way may be
by the rails — in order to approach (if not to recognize, as Hegel says)
the other." (Charles 1979 p. 36)

Cage's train-work lays down a track, by means of precise specification
of the boundary conditions for a defined segment of time-space to allow
things to happen for those taking part. Here it is easy to see how disparate
the experience of this work must have been, depending on the singular situation
of each individual, and yet constituting a three-day 'we'. The music happens
as the world itself, including also the playing of harmonic, tonal music
by the bands who show up at the railway stations, and the work is hardly
restricted to an aural phenomenon. The work is only such by having its
limits, its boundary conditions laid down, e.g. where the microphones and
loud-speakers are to be installed. Insofar as the lo/goj
of nou=j gathers into the definite limits of
an i)de/a, it can therefore be said that the
train-work is logical, but its lo/goj is neither
harmonic nor rhythmic according to counted time.

II.3.2 Spatiality of Cagean musical happening

A further aspect of Cagean music is the superposition of works in
simultaneous performances.(13)
Cagean music listens to the urfugue of music itself musicking and hears
that it is not tones that are superimposed to form chords according to
harmonic rules, nor melody lines superimposed according to the rules of
contrapuntal harmony, but sounds and noises themselves, some of which may
or may not be pure, pitched tones. This alters the spatiality of
music, for now there is no distinction in music between musical tone and
unmusical noise, so a musical performance does not have to be protected
from the outside world of noise. Conversely, musics can now commingle without
having to obey the arithmetic ratios of harmony as to which sounds fit
with one another. Moreover, the performance of different, superposed works
now allows and requires a spatial distribution; the music emanates from
different locations. The musicians themselves may even move during the
course of playing. The spatial placement of musicians performing the same
work now enters as an additional parameter for the performance of musical
works, or rather, happenings. The term 'happening' is more appropriate
than 'work' because of the underdetermination of the music by the composer's
instructions and its permeability to the sonic surroundings. A work requires
definite limits (o(/roi) to define it, but the
Cagean lo/goj leaves a lot open, defining only
precisely the loose boundary conditions for a spatio-temporal happening.

The spatial separation of locations of the musical performance means
that there is now no listening centre, no con-centration on a location
at which the performance is to be 'authentically' heard. The urfugue of
Cage's New Music thus sends musical happenings also for a plurality
of listeners located at different places.(14)
Each listener is an individual with its own freedom of movement,
whose experience of the performance is individual, even though he or she
is part of an overall happening with an overall mood. The listener's individuality
does not stand in contradiction to a musical work's definite definition
according to a score allowing only certain interpretative room for play.
Rather, each individual listening experience is valid in itself within
the parameters staked out by the composer's specification of the musical
happening's boundary conditions.

The spatial dispersion of superposed musical happenings or of musical
performers induces also an other musical architecture. Western harmonic
music's architecture is focused, concentrated on the centre of performance
whence the work's score is realized acoustically. 'Ideally', i.e. according
to the i)de/a, there is a central stage for
the musicians around which the audience is seated (semi-)concentrically
to concentrate on the single source of emanation of the performed score.
The architecture of a concert hall is consequently concentric, and infinite
amounts of care are applied to ensure the acoustically pure dispersion
of sound from the centre. The audience remains seated, still, to focus
on and absorb the work, with certain seats being preferred over others
whence the central source cannot be heard as well. Cagean music, by contrast,
permits and demands freedom of movement of the audience, which is no longer
concentrated,
but rather open to and dispersed among the acoustic happenings in which the performance
of several compositions may commingle, and that differently at different
locations.

II.3.3 Historical recasting of music's urfugue

Since Cagean music sets the boundary conditions for a musical art work
so widely, thus admitting also the play of contingency, it is no
wonder that not only composers, conductors and musicians from the tradition
of Western harmony, but also composers in the avant-garde, such as Boulez
and Xenakis, have accused Cage of "amateurism" (Charles 1979 p. 39; cf.
also Eldred 1995/2006 Chap. 8). Boulez, Xenakis and others presumably regard
themselves as having remained within 'rational' professional bounds of
composing music that can be taken seriously. Cage's conception of music,
which he has expounded in diverse ways over many years with commendable
lucidity, therefore opens up a rift; it causes strife among composers at
the forefront over how Western music is to be recast outside its harmonic
cast, and this is a conflict of ideas, i.e. over the alogical sight
that music offers of itself beyond the harmonic-rational lo/goj
of counted time. To carry out this conflict requires a clear idea of the
essence of music, which is nothing musical in the usual sense. It therefore
cannot be decided solely by discussing music as composed for and musicked
by human beings.

In my 1995 study, from another angle, I have tried to lay out what an
art work is in the Western metaphysical sense. Contingency is antithetical
to
the idea of a work, for which there is an a)rxh/
that, as know-how, knows how to bring finally a work about, controlling
and correcting contingency along the way. To admit contingency itself into
the making of a work, and an art work in particular, is to abandon, or
at least loosen, archical control and to leave the result open to the play
of chance. Hence Cage's idea of music represents a radical break with the
very conception of a musical work. He does not accept merely "controlled
aleatoric", like Lutoslawski did, but goes the whole way in allowing the
resulting musical happening to contradict any intentions and likes and
dislikes he may have had.

In the present study I try to think through the essencing of music,
its urfugue, and of Western harmonic music in particular, in a non-metaphysical
way, using Heidegger's late thinking on the essencing of language as a
guide. Perhaps this effort will provide some orientation for ongoing discussions
on the making of Western music. With respect to Cage it can be asked, what
urfugue of music's essencing he was listening to. The urfugue of Cagean
music is a loosening of the hold of the lo/goj
over sonic movement that allows room for the play of contingency in the
world's happening time-space. This urfugue's quivering grants a mood of
calm letting-be to listeners and performing musicians on making way to
music. The historical essencing of time that goes hand in hand with a Cagean
music is three-dimensional, ecstatic time in which the history of a sound
is neither a causal chain nor an harmonic law, and the sonic future has
an openness to the play of contingency rather than a causal or law-like
predetermination. That this formulation may not be far from the mark is
suggested by Daniel Charles' question to Cage, "Accordingly it seems that
for you music is the best means of clarifying this process of an access
to being, this movement of 'openness' that we cannot name without deforming
it?" (Charles 1984 p. 185)

II.4 Music as critique and subversion

II.4.1 Electronic music as social critique?

Under the name of its leading-light, Adorno, the Frankfurt School has for
decades been at the forefront for those thinking critically on music in
the sense of criticizing politically the existing social relations of capitalism.
The vocabulary of the culture industry, the production of music for profit
and the consumption of pop music by the acquiescent masses, the manipulation
of mass taste by corporations, class domination, alienated wage-labour,
the commodification of art works, the view of avant-garde music as an Utopian
anticipation of a society free of domination has become commonplace and
put into practice by numerous progressive composers.

For one of Adorno's most prominent disciples, Heinz-Klaus Metzger, avant-garde
composers are in alliance with those who "name the technical need of the
age by its social name and demand the technically immediately possible
dawning of the Messianic age, a humankind well cared for in every way.
Shocking ways of playing orchestra instruments may contribute to this."
(die technische Notdurft der Epoche bei ihrem gesellschaftlichen Namen
nennen und den technisch sofort möglichen Anbruch des messianischen
Zeitalters, ein in all Stücken wohlversorgte Menschheit fordern. Dazu
mögen choquierende Spielarten auf Orchesterinstrumenten beitragen.
Metzger I 1990 p. 15) Music is given a Messianic, Utopian socio-political
mission to open the future anticipatively by practising free social relations
on an experimental basis. This understanding is explicit in Metzger's writings
and in musical works by John Cage and Christian Wolff, in particular. Such
a politically critical music, however, presumes that a politically critical,
anti-capitalistic stance can be taken as read and applied as a criterion
for the making of progressive music. The liberation of sounds from the
laws of harmony, as pioneered by Cage and taken up by many others, and
the liberation of people from social relations of capitalist class oppression,
however, may not fit together in the way so easily presupposed and wished
for.

In an essay published in 1976, Gerry Stahl adds a further interesting
aspect to the critical stance of the Frankfurt School and its wake by considering
also, on the other side of the political divide, Heidegger, who, especially
in hidebound Germany, has been exposed to sustained campaigns of political
defamation. One can notice an infiltration of Heidegger also into Daniel
Charles' writings, more subtle than that into Stahl's. Stahl bears all
the markings of a critical left thinker willing to appropriate certain
aspects of Heidegger's thinking for the good cause of social liberation.
This is problematic insofar as the question is not posed regarding the
freedom of human being as such; rather, the unfreedom of human being under
capitalism is presupposed politically, pointing, in turn, to a political
revolutionizing of social relations. The moot point is the philosophical
relationship between Marxian and Heideggerian thinking, which can never
be clarified from within an assumed political stance because, in posing
the question of the historical possibility of freedom, all political preconceptions
must be suspended as too superficial for the task of thinking (cf. Eldred
2000/2010). The very question of free sociation — and with it the question
of the ontology of social power (Eldred 2008/2011) — is at stake. The gaze
has to focus on that which is — a question of epochal being — in
order first to see humankind's historical predicament and what it has to
do with deep-seated ways of thinking initiated in ancient Greek philosophy
that are all too blithely still assumed today as self-evident.

Stahl assigns to electronic music the task of encouraging "an origin-al
way of creatively dwelling in the world, of existentially understanding
contemporary Being, and of receptively anticipating a new epoch. When perceived
as situated in industrial society, electronic music, like Heideggerian
philosophy, evokes a radically different form of technology..." (Stahl
1976). He asserts that "the manipulative techniques of pop music serve
to maintain existing power relations throughout society. Their removal
would clear the way for democratic alternatives in the production, distribution,
and consumption of culture". This has a Marcusian flavour that mixes also
with Feenberg's critique of technology (cf. Eldred 2009b) which proposes
that liberation consists in genuine democratization pervading also the
economic sphere, replacing the capitalist 'logic' of profit maximization
by a politically democratic organization of economic life, as if democratization
per se could unleash human freedom and that manipulative social power relations
derived only from capitalists' gainful strivings. Talk of "manipulation"
suggests a capitalist class conspiracy to dupe the masses, who would be
free if only they could shake off their wage-labour shackles.

Stahl singles out "Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenaxis, and Pierre
Boulez" as the representatives of European electronic music who reflect
on "the tradition which Cage simply rejects", thus maintaining a link to
it in "systematically criticiz[ing] the categories which define their heritage".
Stockhausen, for instance, is a pioneer of electronic music who explores
its possibilities experimentally. "Each of Stockhausen's pieces, for instance,
pursues a different idea: rhythmic permutation, timbral variety, spatial
movement, changing essential parameters: total system, human improvisation,
pure chance, degrees of determination; vocal, orchestral, electronic, mixed
sources." The historical preconditions for such experiments in electronic
music include the technological means for the unbounded manipulation of
electronic sounds and the exhaustion of the potentials of the European
tradition of harmonic music that provoked Schönberg, Webern, Varèse
and others to go beyond it. As a composer working after the rupture, Morton
Feldman points out, "One of the problems about functional harmony is
that it hears for us, see. We no longer have to hear." (Feldman 1984 p.
159 cited in Staub 1992 p. 86) Harmonic music had become clichéd
for the ears.

There are, however, deeper-lying historical movements afoot intimately
related to the onset of the modern age itself and a concurrent transformation
of the essencing of time. The exhaustion of harmonic music, its supercession,
its survival and continual re-enactment as a beloved museum treasure in
the world's finest concert halls and the commodified popular song, all
entertain subterranean ties with the closing of the gap between arithmetic
discreteness and geometric continuity under the impetus to gain a mathematical
hold on motion (Descartes, Newton, Leibniz). Time itself comes to be regarded
as a continuum of real numbers, rather than as the rhythmic beat of a clock
counting movement. This is the mathematical precondition for coming to
terms with motion in time. In his Regulae, Descartes lays down the
blue-print for the mathematico-scientific modern age by prescribing that
the access to all phenomena shall be by way of magnitude (Eldred 2009/2011
§ 2.7). This mode of access ensures that from a given now-point in
real time, the dynamic state of a physical system at another time can be
precalculated through solving the pertinent equations of motion. In music,
it is the score that prescribes a determinate sonic movement according
to various sonic parameters.

Sound is just one phenomenon among many others that is subjected to
a mathematical treatment by the science of physics as a continuous sound
wave consisting of rapid oscillations of a medium, usually air. The mathematical
analysis of sound waves becomes an endeavour of research that goes beyond
what Pythagorean harmony has to say about pure sounds. Pure sine waves
that can be characterized by a single frequency parameter signifying a
pure pitch are now only one very special case among sound waves that may
consist of the most complicated superpositions that include not just overtones
describable by harmonic ratios. The analytical insight into sounds, including
the noise of everyday surroundings (street noise, traffic, machines, factories,
trains, planes, sirens, etc.), makes them more amenable to deployment in
musical composition, especially through the fact that appropriate electronic
technologies arise that can generate waves according to precisely calculable
and controllable parameters including frequency, amplitude and superposition
of many waves.

The anharmonic irrationality of noise is no impediment to a mathematical
science of (continuous, but approximatively digitizable) sound waves and
its auxiliary electronic generative technologies, so that complex sounds
come within the scope of such logical compositorial imagination. Sound
waves, no matter how complex, can be generated, composed and manipulated
at will. The refinement of analytic-mathematical insight into sound waves
even allows a single sound or tone to be explored musically (La Monte Young).
Insofar, electronic music corresponds tacitly to the Heideggerian set-up
(Gestell) as the essencing of modern technology.

The mathematico-scientific access to beings as a whole in the Cartesian
age discloses the stuff of music to be sound that shows itself to the mathematico-scientific
composer's mind as sound waves with a certain mathematical description.
During the classical age of harmonic music from the ancient Greeks through
to the nineteenth century, the stuff of music was tones that could be composed
and controlled according to certain laws of harmony that underwent modification
and refinement throughout this epoch. Here, as elsewhere in this study,
harmony is understood to encompass not only the harmonic ratios of chords,
the determination of scales, the quint circular relations among keys, but
also melody and the contrapuntal relations between melody lines. Musical
technology delivered instruments that produced tones of pure timbre that
were disclosed to the composer's mind through the laws of harmonic ratio.
Electronic music depends on an alternative historical disclosure of sound
in which the parameters number more than only pitch and rhythmic duration
as composed in notated music.

If electronic music is an offspring of the set-up that remains hidden
as such to today's composers, musicians and audiences, how does this affect
Stahl's and others' claim on this advanced music as a vehicle for a social
critique of capitalism? This question cannot be answered within music theory
since it is a philosophical question concerning the interrelations between
the essences of technology and of capitalism. These are the set-up and
the gainful game, respectively, which will not be spelt out here (cf. Eldred
2000/2010). The commodification of music corresponds to, is a response
to the gainful game. The critique of capitalism is not that of exploitative,
surplus-value-pumping class domination, but of all-pervasive, desirous,
gain-seeking across all classes. The selling of music, both live and recorded,
is a process of valuing and estimating that music on the market. The greater
the popular appeal of the music, i.e. the more clichéd the tune,
the greater the revenues. The proceeds of realized market valuation flow
to musicians, composers (songwriters), promotion and record companies.
An audience only buys music in live or recorded form because it has some
appeal that is always associated with some mood of other that is part of
the feeling for life of that audience. For the most part, music caters,
or even panders, to bringing to resonance all sorts of everyday moods that
are part of everyday living in our age, reflecting the moods of the age
and thus confirming, and even engendering, personal identifications with
the world. Popular music is and must be entertaining. As such, there is
nothing avant-garde about such musics, although there are ever new waves
of popular music arriving that are fashionably and faddishly in tune with
current social vibes.

The commodification of music is enabled especially by its reproducibility
which, in turn, goes hand in hand with the electronic technologies enabling
such reproduction. Electronic music itself is peculiarly suited for reproduction,
being as it is 'loud-speaker music' whose signals can easily be recorded,
processed and mixed. The reproduction of recorded music is even able to
capture the spatiality of multiple sound sources to an extent through stereophonic,
quadrophonic, etc. recording and playback. There is a conviction among
many composers and musicians, John Cage being a prominent example, that
only live music is genuine music. Some of Cage's most famous compositions
such as his various Imaginary Landscapes, turn electronic devices
such as radio receivers, magnetic tapes, vinyl records, into sources for
live music performances by subverting the mere playback of a recording
through techniques of random mixing, in particular, akin to collage techniques
in fine art.

No doubt there is a considerable difference between live performances
of any kind of music and the playback of a recording, whether it be a studio
or live one. Many musicians can only make the music they make by performing
it live, experiencing that live musical atmosphere, so that a live recording
is only a secondary by-product, a pale documentary. Listening to recordings
is generally done in one's private sphere, whereas live performance has
a public — two entirely different atmospheres. In today's electronically
facilitated world, however, the experience of listening to music is overwhelmingly
one of listening to 'canned' music. Much music, whether avant-garde, classical
or pop, would never come to the ears of listeners without recordings and
electronic media. Today's multiple media of music dissemination convey
also a music's vibe to which listeners attune. Recording techniques have
become technically superb. The pleasure of listening to music of all kinds
remains healthy, even and especially under historical conditions of its
reproducibility. The mass diffusion of music through recordings and mass
media, whether it earns money or not, can perhaps justify itself through
the few thoughtful, listening ears that will hear also the most interesting
avant-garde compositions. In any case, to proclaim live music to be 'authentic'
and recorded music to be 'inauthentic' is a too easy dichotomy.

So-called cerebral music that arises through reflection on the deeper
structures of music and attempts to explore beyond the limits finds it
difficult to survive through audience appeal, since it sounds strange,
not resonating with any familiar mood and not repeating well-loved, familiar
musical clichés. Nevertheless, such pioneering music bravely opens
the way to the appropriation of strange new sounds that find their way
also into popular musics as sound effects, adding a spice of innovation
to familiar, done-to-death harmonic formats. Avant-garde composers compose
not for money, but for the sake of enjoying a creative life of sonic exploration.
There is willing renunciation in this. An avant-garde composer needs to
find a niche in civil society providing enough income to support a creative
composer's life. Therein lies no critique of capitalism per se, since it
is the reified, money-mediated interchange of a liberal capitalist society
that spawns the modest, meagre or comfortable, interstices of individual
creative freedom (Eldred 2008/2011 Chap. 11 vi) et seq.).

II.4.2 An attunement to being through electronic music?

Although Stahl's 1976 article is entitled, 'Attuned to being: Heideggerian
music in technological society', very little is said of attunement at all,
let alone in relation to the nature or essence of electronic music, which
is at the focus. The only passage referring to attunement reads:

The secret of composition, says Adorno, is the power to transform
the material in the process of progressive adequation. Where it achieves
this, electronic music provides a model of an openness to Being which forswears
the imposition of will in favor of an appropriation which lets Being be
what it historically could be. Here, more than in any of Heidegger's own
writings, it becomes clear how much fine-tuning attunement requires.

How does electronic music, of all musics, renounce an "imposition of will"?
If successful composition consists in "the power to transform the material
in the process of progressive adequation", how is this not a fashioning
of the material according to the essence of poi/hsij?
And to what is the material fashioned and manipulated through "progressive
adequation" if not to a guiding i)de/a, a sight
of being, that the composer has in mind? Electronic music's composition,
Stahl claims, is 'tastefully' varied according to the procedure, "techniques
suggested by the electronic instruments are tried out, judged by the ear,
varied, explored." "Attunement" in the above-quoted passage must be interpreted
in the sense of "adequation" and 'being in tune with', not simply as mood.
Why is electronic music at all especially attuned to "what it [Being] historically
could be"? Since electronic music enables total analytic control over sounds,
even more so than serial music, how could it amount to a letting-be? In
breaking with the laws of harmony, electronic music "is determined to eliminate
the subjective willfulness inherent in the suppression of all noise", thus
admitting noise as musical. This admission of noise, however, "requires
increased control over its materials", which Stahl seeks to justify by
referring to an unconvincing dialectical figure in Adorno:

Only a music which is master of itself would also be master
of the freedom from every constraint, even from its own. This follows the
analogy that only in a rationally organized society would the necessity
of oppression by organization disappear along with want. [...] The consequence
of artistic technique as truthful domination is always simultaneously also
its opposite, the development of the subjective sensibility into a receptivity
toward the impulse of that which is not itself subject. (Adorno 1963 p.
432)

Adorno's notion of "truthful domination" is one of sensitive adequation
to the musical material in line with the traditional Aquinan formula for
the essence of truth as veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus. It is
hardly radical, especially when paired with a problematic faith in a "rationally
organized society". How this continued Adornoean faith in the metaphysical
lo/goj
is to be reconciled with Heidegger's momentous attempt to overcome, or
slip around the lo/goj and the determination
of human being as to\ z%=on lo/gon e)/xon remains
unanswered in Stahl's essay. The lo/goj, rationality
and poi/hsij remain at the core of both Adorno's
and Stahl's determination of the essencing of music, thus passing over
the access to being's temporal quivering itself through attunement that can never
be gathered and brought to a stand by the lo/goj.

What being could be historically — for Stahl as well as, presumably,
for the Frankfurt School — is generalized democracy that encompasses also
the economy, thus overcoming class domination, a prospect Stahl finds neglected
in Heidegger's thinking. Such collective subjectivity is not a particularly
radical prospect, and it depends on suggestively equating democracy with
freedom, a highly contentious postulate. The question is rather, is humankind
at all capable and desirous of an alogical freedom whose very sense first
has to be cast through long disputation with the philosophical tradition.
Moreover, if attunement is taken to mean being in tune with being's reverberations
throughout time-space, what does this have to do with attunement as the moodful way
in which the world opens up for historical human being?

II.4.3 Audible ecosystemics (Di Scipio)

The still metaphysical, productionist emphasis in electronic music on the
electronic control of sound waves is tendentially subverted in some of
the electronic "audible ecosystemic" compositions of Agostino Di Scipio
which also demonstrate that music is not the expression of a composer or
musician subject's interior, but depends in the first place on a receptivity
for the world. Di Scipio has developed electronic works which depend on
the ongoing acoustic feedback from the environment in which they are set
up. Feedback loops alter what music can be heard by the listening audience
whose audible movements themselves feed into the live 'performance' of
the electronic circuits. Hence he says of one of his works:

Stanze Private - Private Rooms amplifies the noise inside
these small rooms, these few transparent jugs and glass ampoules. And it
amplifies the noise in the surrounding environment, in the largest room
where the installation is placed. It produces sound from the audience.
We as listeners can not only be part of this small ecosystem, our physical
presence alters the acoustics of the surrounding space, altering the dynamic.
[...] Often I detect sounds reflecting the social function of the surrounding
space, but small sounds that are typically removed from our auditory experience
- acoustic scraps, sonic garbage. These sounds are analyzed by a computer,
with digital signal processing methods, so the computer measures some features
of sound, and that information is finally used to drive the process of
generation and transformation of the environmental sound itself. [...]
the computer process is rendered space-dependent, adaptive. (Di Scipio
2009)

One can see that in this sophisticated electronic work, the electronic
control of sound is employed to renounce control over sonic happenings.
It also demonstrates, in contrast to subjectivist-expressionist conceptions
of music tied to modern aesthetics, that music as sonic art is generated
by human being-in-the-world and human receptivity to this being-in-the-world.
The subject-object split that has become dumbly unquestioned second nature
everywhere in today's thinking becomes untenable in this work if one is
prepared to reflect upon it.

The assertion by Di Scipio's interviewer, Marco Mancuso, that "Stanze
Private - Private Rooms uses sound as a medium and a means of emotional
communication, as a real transfer of behavioral information." (ibid.) is
therefore questionable in multiple ways. Is sound "used" as a "medium"
and "means" of "emotional communication" for a "transfer" of "information"?
All these terms belong to the vocabulary of subjectivist-productionist-metaphysical
aesthetics, and do not do the sonic work itself justice. To regard sound
as a "medium" for transferring "information" is to overlook that sound
does not have to 'mean' anything, not even emotionally, but that it quivers
moodfully with the world. To claim that the work amalgamates multiple levels
"into a single emotional and aesthetic" experience and employs "the sound
as a material in space" is a hackneyed way of thinking. Rather, the work
is more appropriately conceived as a live interplay among its elements:
the 'noisy' listeners, the walls of the room, the nodes of the electronic
network which has been tuned by trial and error to deliver acoustically
acceptable results for listening ears (e.g. no split ear drums) that are
accompanied by attunements beyond electronic control.

II.4.4 A musical subversion of harmonically logical
time (Feldman)

Several composers of New Music such as Cage, Wolff and Nono understood
their composing also in political terms. Cage and Wolff, for instance,
debated the merits of anarchism vs. socialism, and both conceived compositions
that were intended to anticipate anarchist or socialist social practices.
This does not apply to the Jewish New York composer, Morton Feldman, who
was concerned with the possibility of composing music when "after Hitler
perhaps there should no longer be any art". (Feldman 1972 p. 154, cited
in Staub 1992 p. 50). In the same interview Feldman says, "in a certain
way I mourn [...] that Schubert has left me". Feldman's composing still
lives from the great period of nineteenth century German music from which,
after the "death of art", he wants to salvage "these very few things very
essential to me [so that...] it can go on working at least a while longer"
(ibid., cited in Staub 1992 p. 49). Feldman relates his composing to one
of the most momentous and disastrous political events in history, National
Socialism, that has tarnished and discredited, if not voided, everything
German, including even great German music. Feldman's music, like Christian Boltanski's
art, thus has a relation to time, namely, the time after the disaster.

This disaster, however, may have a deeper connection to time, unbeknowns
to Feldman himself, than being situated within a sequence of world-shaking
political events. An historical transformation in the essencing of time
in connection with the historical consummation and demise of the Western
lo/goj
is not accessible to historiography's investigation into and recounting
of events, but only to philosophical thinking that traces the deeper, scarcely
perceptible movements in historical time itself that leave a mark in certain
philosophers' thinking. Cage has been presented above as a composer who
has broken radically with the hegemony of the harmonic arithmetic lo/goj
in music that relies on counted time. He lucidly formulates in thoughtful
words of Buddhist inspiration what he is doing in his art, leaving us to
connect the dots as to what this means for the essence of Western music,
which, as already pointed out, is nothing musical.

With Feldman, the break with the lo/goj is
not so visible and demonstrable, nor spectacular, but it is there and resides
hidden in the enigmatic nature of his music. He does not introduce any
new system of music, nor even any new principles, nor is he nearly as straightforward
a presenter of his guiding thoughts as Cage is. "His pieces are not serial,
not programmatic, not aleatoric, and not even post-modern or historical.
They do not refer unambiguously to anything and are not theoretically secured."
(Seine Stücke sind nicht seriell, nicht programmatisch, nicht aleatorisch,
und auch nicht postmodern oder historisch. Sie verweisen auf nichts eindeutig
und sind theoretisch nicht abgesichert. Staub 1992 p. 57)

As Staub lays out in his careful, detailed study, Feldman takes the
traditional system of harmonic music, including its conventional notation,
and quietly and subtly subverts its harmonic intervals and
rhythmic patterns so that they wobble and quiver in another acoustic time.
Thus, for instance, the counted measure for each bar in the score of the
eighty-minute-long Untitled Composition from 1981 which Staub investigates,
first concentrating on a detailed analysis of pages 17 and 18 of the score,
changes bewilderingly from bar to bar. For example, there are the 9 bars
of the third pattern on p. 17 of the score with the sequence 3/16, 2/4,
3/16, 3/8, 1/4, 5/16, 1/8 3/16, 2/4. Although there are repetitions of
single bars, these crop up and disappear unexpectedly. The repetitions
of groups of bars such as the nine mentioned above are permutations with
'neither rhyme nor reason'. The interplay between piano and cello is, for
bars on end, a back-and-forth between just two tones, d2(15)
on the piano and f2flat as harmonic on the cello, where at first it is
a mystery why the cello's note should be notated as f2flat and not simply
as e2, its logically notated equivalent in the harmonic scale.

Although notated in the conventional harmonic system, the music's rhythm
is quietly broken by continual irregularity. Although acoustic time, i.e.
the duration of notes and rests, continues to be counted by bars and within
bars, it is an irregularly counted time with a wobble, aperiodic, without
a recognizable pattern. Staub, following Feldman himself, interprets the
insistent repetition or reiteration of the interval between d2 on the piano
and f2flat on the cello as the offer to perceive this small interval of
a minor second in hundreds of different shades of colour, just as the naturally
dyed colours of a Turkish carpet, whose fabric is dyed in only small lots,
vary in the finest of gradations and are woven into the carpet in such
a way that an irregular, unforeseeable, intricate chromatic pattern results
"that gives the basic colour a quite definite sheen and shimmer" (Sie [die
Farbabstufungen] verleihen der Grundfarbe einen ganz bestimmten Glanz und
Schimmer. Staub 1992 p. 78). The cello offers the possibility of playing
f2flat in a thousand finely differentiated ways, whereas the piano, whose
tuned strings are hit by felt hammers, is tied to its tempered d2. "When
you're working with a minor second as long as I've been, it's very, very
wide." (Feldman 1984a p. 114/192 cited in Staub 1992 p. 52)

Even within harmonic theory, there is no unambiguous harmonic definition
of the minor second interval as an arithmetic ratio. It could be 16:15,
17:16, 18:17, 19:18, 20:19, 21:20, 22:21, 15:14, 14:13 or even 13:12 (Staub
1992 p. 54). The countable successor ratios forming the basis of the harmonic
system elide into a hard-to-define, broken continuity as the successor
ratios approach unity, and this is the indefinable ambiguity with which
Feldman works, allowing the music to ring out in myriad different tonal
shades in an unpredictable, arhythmic time. Although the interval between
d2 on the piano and f2flat on the cello is mostly played in that order,
suddenly it may invert to its opposite, and then revert to the original
order. Or the pair of notes is interrupted unexpectedly by a single note
followed by a bar of rest. Although there are patterns, they are irregular
and subject to countless fine variations on repetition.

Feldman, however, avoids speaking of variation or repetition when referring
to two aspects of twentieth century music: "One is change, variation. I
prefer the word change. The other is reiteration, repetition. I prefer
the word reiteration. [...] The change then becoming that which then becomes
reiteration, and the reiteration is changing. [...] So it's the same, but
yet it's not the same." (Feldman 1984a pp. 212, 193) The reiteration of
patterns leads to differentation. "And I want to see 'differentiation'..."
(ibid. p. 186) The word variation suggests there is an underlying, unchanging
principle that is varied, as in variations on a theme, but Feldman's enigmatic
music has no principle in this sense. He therefore also avoids speaking
of concepts, preferring instead acoustically realistic things that are
perceived:

The piece last night [String Quartet (II)] is involved with
two aspects which I feel are less conceptual and more realistic. I'm interested
in realistic things, actually. We'll talk about concepts. So I try not
to give something a name. That's very, very, very important for me. (ibid.
p. 184)

Avoiding concepts and words amounts to avoiding the lo/goj
and its underlying hold on the music as a principle. In the place of methodology,
serial, aleatoric or whatever, Feldman has a perceptual focus that shifts
unmethodically in processes of retranslation. "What I do then is, I translate
[...] Always retranslating and then saying, now let's do it with another
kind of focus." (ibid. p. 186) The avoidance of concepts and names accounts
also for his disconnected, leaping style in lectures and writings.

Later in the score of Untitled Composition, the piano starts
playing chords, broken chords and arpeggios whose notes do not fit together
according to any of the harmonic laws. They are neither harmonious nor
dissonant because they are simply outside the harmonic system. And yet
they gather themselves in their reiterations and fine retranslations into
their own acoustic unity as if they had their own idiosyncratic, strange
logic. So in this way, too, Feldman composes notes according to some 'as
if', pseudo-harmonic lo/goj. The harmonic system
is thus subverted in its two fundamental dimensions, of counted rhythm
and of tonal intervals derived from arithmetic successor ratios. There
is no simple, nor even complex principle from which the composition could
be derived. "One cannot help but notice in the course of writing a piece
that some underlying principle seems to be there. Now, the question is
to what degree you want to embrace this underlying principle. [...] Sometimes
you meet it halfway. Sometimes you just shake its hand and it leaves..."
(Feldman 1976 p. 4 cited in Staub 1992 p. 46) The composing just happens
through acutely focused attention, goes on and on, and "dies a natural
death" (Feldman 1984a p. 203, cited by Staub 1992 p. 57). The lo/goj
of Western harmony does not hold sway in Feldman's music, although it is
hard to put one's finger on just how this takes place, since the music proceeds
so quietly and self-assuredly.

The music is enigmatic because reason (ratio, lo/goj)
cannot see and define the basic counted rationality in it, neither rhythmically
nor harmonically. The counted rhythm becomes jumbled, and the fine gradations
of tonal interval lead the harmonic ratios ad absurdum. There are definitely
patterns in this music, but they are continually shifting in subtle ways
that the ear can scarcely follow, let alone make sense of. Acoustic time
itself quivers differently in Feldman's music, beyond the control of the
lo/goj,
granting moods that neither fit the conventional emotional logic of beloved
Western harmony nor permit unreflective jubilation, hubris or brash self-confidence.

II.4.5 "The composer makes plans ... Music laughs"
(Feldman)

Feldman is aware of the dilemma in which music finds itself after the rupture
with harmonically logical music, and he knows of the Greek origins of music,
"that for something to be beautiful, it must also be sensible" (Feldman
1985 p. 113), and that music is "logical" (ibid.), so that "all we are
left with is just this duality — of precise means creating indeterminate
emotions" (ibid.). This is a traditional, productionist conception of music-making,
with "emotions" as the indeterminate product, i.e. the musical logic, although
harmonically precise, is not able to precisely bring forth determinate
emotions, just as the te/xnh of rhetoric aims
at, but cannot reliably bring forth a certain pre-envisaged mood in the
audience.

Feldman does not distinguish between the subjectivist conception of
emotion as something in the interior of a subject and the phenomenon of
a mood hanging atmospherically in the air, and this is because he does
not distance himself from the metaphysical split between subject and object
that arose only in the modern age, which now, for him, corresponds to a
"duality" or "dichotomy" between logical, harmonic means and indeterminately
produced emotions. The New Music was supposed to leave this dichotomy behind,
but "a new dichotomy was about to take place" (ibid. p. 114) consisting
in "a strange resistance of the sounds themselves to taking on an instrumental
identity. It was as though, having had a taste of freedom, they now wanted
to be really free." (ibid.)

This is reminiscent of Cage's intentions to liberate sounds, but Feldman
distances himself from both Boulez and Cage in claiming that "it is not
a question of a controlled or a de-controlled methodology. In both cases
something is being made. And to make something is to constrain it." (ibid.)
This echoes the Greek productionist understanding of being — the form or
i)de/a
is the guiding sight for fashioning the material into the limits (pe/raj)
of the final product — and at the same time hints that Feldman is trying
paradoxically to do something other than constrain sounds within the limits
of a composition. He is disturbed that "instrumental color robs the sound
of its immediacy. The instrument has become for me a stencil, the deceptive
likeness
of a sound." (ibid.) 'Stencil' is akin to 'cliché'. Feldman wants
to liberate musical sound from clichés, but he is at a loss as to
how to do this. He "began to feel that the sounds were not concerned with
my ideas of symmetry and design, that they wanted to sing of other things",
but at the same time, "to think of a music without instruments is [...]
a little premature" (ibid.). "Ideas of symmetry and design" are formal
ideas, i.e. i)de/ai or sights that enable a
work to come to stand and show itself from within its defined limits and
thus to be. And yet to be a composer, Feldman must put together
sounds, and that not merely at random, arbitrarily. Hence he says:

I have found no answer to this dilemma. [...] It seems to me
that, in spite of our efforts to trammel it, music has already flown the
coop ... escaped. There is an old proverb: 'Man makes plans ... God laughs'.
The composer makes plans ... Music laughs. (ibid.)

Here we have it: in the very first and originary place, music is not a
human product made under the guidance of leading ideas, but is prior to
composed and musicked music. The composer must first hear music's moodful
quivering in order to notate it. The sound of music sounds soundlessly
to the composer's ear, and Feldman is disturbed by the translation of the
musical into the instrumental sound which, he says, "exaggerates the sound,
blurs it, makes it larger than life, gives it a meaning, an emphasis it
does not have in my ear" (ibid.). Urmusic resists being heard instrumentally,
sensibly. Yet it is heard by the human ear. The mind's ear is attuned to
urmusic and attuned by it. This urmusic has no meaning; it does not point
to anything meaningful that could be understood and put into words. The
only way it can make way to the human ear is through the attunement which
urmusic's quivering grants and to which human being is open. Only thus
is human being originarily musical, and not through making music, which
is first a consequence of this originary openness and exposedness to urmusic.

Cross, Jonathan; Harvey, Jonathan et al. Identity and Difference: Essays
on music, language and time Collected Writings of the Orpheus Institute,
Ghent, Leuven U.P. 2004 containing inter alia Helmut Lachenmann 'Philosophy
of Composition - Is there such a thing?' 'Music and Language' by Albrecht
Wellmer and 'Theses on the Relationship between Music and Time' by Richard
Klein.

Cf. also my earlier essay 'Sprache
(und Musik) nach Heidegger' in: Eldred 1993/1910. This essay has been
taken up in some detail by Eduardo Marx in his Heidegger
und der Ort der Musik Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg
1998, who pursues the following project: "Thus a musical altercation becomes
recognizable as a path of thinking which Heidegger himself did not take
and also did not point out explicitly as a path to be taken, but which
is nevertheless suggested." (So gibt sich die musikalische Auseinandersetzung
als ein Denkweg zu erkennen, den Heidegger zwar nicht beging und auch nicht
explizit als einen zu begehenden auswies, der aber nahegelegt wird. Vorwort
S.7) Back

Theodor W. Adorno 'Musik und Technik' 1978. The slippery,
amphibious ambiguity of the German word 'Technik' as employed in the essay
demands a twofold translation as either/both 'technique' and 'technology'.
Cf. Eldred 2006/2010. Back

Cf. also my earlier extended discussion of Cage in Eldred
1995/2006. Back

It should be noted that such a prominent expert on New
Music as Heinz-Klaus Metzger (I 1990) does not go into the momentous shift
from harmonic arithmetic ratios to mere mathematical quantification, presumably
because a close confrontation with the Aristotelean casting of counted
time is not germane to his thinking. Back

"Music composes itself" John Cage on his 'Etudes Australes',
cited in Charles 1979 p. 39.
Back

For example, the superposition of Rozart Mix, Concert
for Piano and Orchestra and Song Books; cf. Charles 1984 Fourth
Interview p. 160. Back

"This year [1980 ...] I heard a string quartet by Morton
Feldman consisting of a single movement lasting one-and-a-half hours. It
was beautiful because it was not beautiful. Through the length it
did not become an object. Despite that it would have left behind the same
impression if the audience had not been chained, but had found itself in
a different architectural situation that had permitted egress and access
at any point in time and space, i.e. at home." John Cage in Charles 1984
Fifth Interview p. 183. Back

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